Brand volunteering: Value co-creation with unpaid consumers

Through collaborative marketing approaches, companies invite consumers to provide unpaid contributions. Companies commonly do this in the realm of brand communities. The key question this article addresses is how can a company lead consumers to offer unpaid contributions to brands as an act of free will? To answer this question, we develop a framework based on volunteer commitment research to study the actions a company takes to engage consumers in unpaid work for brands. We use this framework to analyse the online collaboration promoted by the carmaker Fiat with its brand community of Alfa Romeo enthusiasts (Alfisti). The research introduces the notion of brand volunteers, that is, brand enthusiasts who are committed to providing unpaid work for the exclusive benefit of the brand. With this notion, the article discusses the possibility of exploiting consumers in value co-creation and the existence of compromises, signifying an agreement between two collaborating parties in which one party (in our case, the consumer) temporarily puts aside possible sources of conflict.