Abstract:

The marketing philosophy of today encourages organizations to engage consumers in the innovation process, at least at the stage of generating ideas. On one hand,  the loyal consumers seem to be the group who have the greatest potential of getting involved in the innovation process, as they have been interested in the brand development for a course of time. Nonetheless, on the other hand, the young adults constitute a group also potentially susceptible to innovation and the search for brands that meet their expectations, and therefore they seem to be a particularly attractive source of innovative ideas. The purpose of the article is to show that some antecedents of the loyalty attitude of young consumers are simultaneously antecedents to their creativity and thus innovative potential. The aim of the conducted research has been to examine which components of attitudes characterize young consumers who could become a source of innovation for the cosmetics market. The survey has been conducted on a sample of 459 students with the usage of the auditorium survey method at three Universities in Poland. It has been concluded that among the analysed antecedents there are groups of factors that characterize a loyalty attitude regardless of the innovation potential and a group of factors which occurrence is particularly associated with the innovation potential and that they derive from cognitive and affective groups of attitude components.