Nowadays, customers have become increasingly dissatisfied with accepting products and services offered by suppliers. Instead, they are involved in product development as co-productor (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004). There are diverse types ranging from online discussion to virtual design enabling customer involved in co-creation activities related to product support. “Customer design” enables the firm to have possibilities enhancing the whole value of product design during development process (Fuchs & Schreier, 2011). However, some of scholars have found that customers cannot always play a useful role in luxury product design. Fuchs and Schreier (2011) studied that buyers can easily observe the source of design, which damage the image of co-designed product. That is because luxury product always played as a specific label of wealth and states to some extend (Ko & Phau, Aiello, 2016). Thus, this study draws from co-creation theory to investigate the specificity of online luxury design, using an experimental method. We analyze and discuss the diverging affection of luxury design held by co-creation idea innovativeness and behavior intensity, and the role played by sponsoring firm and community members.

Cewebrity is somebody who is only, or perhaps mostly famous through their presence on the Internet, an internet person who crosses over to the mainstream, so called web celebrity or Internet celebrity. Recognizing that Internet celebrities’ participation will bring about improvements of company performance, marketers have considered them to be new source of innovation dedicating to company’s success. For example, fashion companies believe that Internet celebrities have good innovation ideas on clothing collocation or even fashion design. Given the relevance of Internet celebrity in practice, researchers have begun to address its merits (Stever and Lawson, 2013). However, it is not yet a well-established field of academic inquiry, because Internet celebrity’s specific characteristics has not been well developed yet. Based on the nature of Internet celebrity as consumer, the theory of customer value co-creation is appropriate to explain these new generated celebrities’ activities in new product development. Activities of Internet celebrities in value co-creation can be shown as communication, idea conception, and product design (Genc and Benedetto, 2015). The current study mainly focuses on the effects of fashion internet celebrities on whole process of product development including product design, production, and commercialization by developing the scale of internet celebrity’s attributes under the perspective of customer value co-creation. Theoretically, the study fills up the research gap that no prior research develops the scales of Internet celebrity and test its effects on new product development. Practically, our work is highly useful for marketers understand the effects of Internet celebrity, thus developing appropriate strategies to utilize them.