Consumer co-creation

下面为大家整理一篇优秀的assignment代写范文- Consumer co-creation，供大家参考学习，这篇论文讨论了消费者共同创造。传统观点认为，消费者是企业外部的，消费者被看作是预先决定消费作用的被动购买者，是企业产品交易的目标。在21世纪之前，消费者一般是企业产品或服务的被动接受者，而在2000年后，消费者将成为产品或服务生产的更积极参与者。消费者可以作为价值的共同创造者。客户通常是企业的共同创造，可以是价值的共同创造者，这进一步说明了客户角色的变化，一个组织应该与其合作伙伴“共同创造”，以便为每个参与者创造价值。消费者参与共同创造服务将对客户和组织产生各种影响。

Introduction

The traditional view is that consumers are outside the enterprise, customers are seen as passive buyers who predetermine the role of consumption, and are the target of enterprise product transactions. However, Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2000) proposed that before the 21st century, consumers were generally passive recipients of corporate products or services, however, after 2000, consumers would become more active participants in the production of products or services. Consumers could act as co-creators of value. Subsequently, the famous marketing scholar Vargo and Lush (2004) in the analysis of the marketing paradigm from product-led logic to service-oriented logic, has repeatedly proposed that customers were usually the co-creation of enterprises and could be a co-creator of value, which further illustrated the changes in customer roles. However, as Dr. Bolton (2010) indicated, thought leaders have recognized that an organization should “co-create” with its partners in order to generate value for each participant. Consumer participation in co-creation services will have various impacts on the customers and the organizations.

Literature review

Definition of consumer co-creation

Kambil (1999) argued that co-creation increases the dynamics of a manufacturer-consumer relationship by directly introducing the production and distribution of customer engagement values. Consumers can participate in any part of the value chain. Meuter and Bitner (1998) propose that the co-creation of services is a joint production service between consumers and service professionals, and consumer involvement and high level of participation will lead to the creation of service outputs. Service co-creation, it is not consumer production or self-service, this service is completely produced by consumers, without the participation of enterprise employees; it is not any form of joint production with low participation of consumers. It is the buyer-seller social interaction and mutual adaptation, in order to maintain deeper value, and to participate in the creation of the core supply itself; it takes place in joint inventions, collaborative design and co-production. Co-creation is considered to be an important manifestation of consumer engagement. Hern and Rindfleisch (2010) defined consumer co-creation as a collaborative new product development behavior from the perspective of new product development, in which consumers actively contribute or select a new product content.

Co-creation is different from co-production. In the service marketing literature, consumer co-production is typically defined as the consumer’s participation in organizationally defined parameters (Witell et al, 2014). Consumer co-creation means that work is transferred from the organizations to the consumers. In a sense, consumers become part of the employees and could influent the quality of service. Lusch and Vargo (2006) argued that co-creation is different from co-production, and co-creation requires consumers to participate in the creation of core products or services themselves. It could occur through joint invention, collaborative design, co-production of related products, and could occur between the business and the consumers or with any other partner in the value network. Co-creation occurs based on the consumer’s uniquely tailored service experience through spontaneous, autonomous behavioral engagement, rather than choosing from pre-defined options. Co-production is based on the logic traditional product leadership, however, co-creation is based on the logic of service-led (Lusch and Vargo, 2006).

Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2003) argued that the core of co-creation is the interaction between consumers and businesses. A personalized experience is created through a purposeful interaction between the network of consumers and the consumer community. Value exists in this unique experience of co-creation. Pater (2009) suggested that research on customer co-creation requires consideration of two fundamental dimensions: Openness and Ownership. The so-called openness emphasizes that anyone in the process of co-creation could participate, or some specific standards stipulate that only some people could participate; the so-called ownership emphasizes the challenges in the process of co-creation and the co-creation of output is only It is owned by the sponsor or shared by all contributors. OHern and Rindfleisch (2010) argued that the basic elements of co-creation include contributions and selection. Because when consumers participate in co-creation, consumers could contribute to demand information (by contributing to novel ideas) and make demand choices (choose which concepts and ideas should be followed). Therefore, the core work of consumers participation in co-creation is to contribute and make choices.

Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004) defined that consumer co-creation is a cooperative struggle between a corporation and their consumers. In fact, enterprises encourage their audience to generate valuable content for the enterprises through engaging with brand. Rioboo (2016) indicated that consumer co-creation means promoting personalized interactions and experience between customers and the producers’ organization, which could be completed through the product total life cycle. Consumers might share their comments and demands, and assist organizations promote and establish communities in the commercialization period. This method offer consumers a one-time limited interaction. Nowadays, it is possible to achieve continuous interaction and truly convey knowledge, demands, aspirations and trends from customers in a more structured way: co-creation.

Types and examples of co-creation in the retail context

Smaliukiene (et al, 2015; OHern and Rindfleisch, 2010) has illustrated four types of consumer co-creation including tinkering, submitting, co-designing and collaborating.

Tinkering

Tinkering is a consumer co-creation model which contains purchasing of contributions from the community by the companies, a comprehensive and scrupulous examination of the contributions, collection of the most promising and enterprising contributions by the company and finally application of the contributions. For example, Little Big Planet, a puzzle platform video game designed by Sony Interactive Entertainment permits the gamers to establish their own levels in the game. The created levels could be shared with other gamers or submitted to Sony. Owing to this "Create and Share" feature, this game has the tagline 'Play, Create, Share'. The most promising contributions are incorporated into the final game and the contributors are rewarded.

Submitting

In terms of submitting, the company exercises control over the contribution activity by placing constraints on the fundamental design, contribution size, moreover, the collection activity by choosing the captivating contributions.

Co-designing

Co-designing contains placement of constraints by the company on the contribution activity and collection of the winning contributions by the contributors themselves. For example, Local Motors hires the co-designing model of consumer co-creation to improve its vehicles. In 2010, Local Motors advanced a car named Rally Fighter in a record 18 months, which is about 5 times faster than what a conventional car manufacturing process takes. By empowering a community of over 2000 designers to submit their designs while still placing some constraints on the basic design, color schemes etc., Local Motors effectively utilized the co-designing model of customer co-creation. The winning design (By Sangho Kim) was chosen as the winning design by the designer community through voting.

An interesting bit of trivia about Local Motors is that it doesn't even have a design team. All the designing is done by the public itself.

Threadless, one of the leading T-shirt manufacturing brands in America also employs co-designing.

Collaborating

Also known as open sourcing, collaborating contains releasing the source code of the product and making it accessible to the general public. The released source code is then open to modification as per the requirement of the users. Examples like Mozilla Firefox, Apache and Linux are all based on collaborating.

Process that consumers and retailers use when utilizing co-creation

The process of consumer co-creation basically contains two essential steps:

1. Contribution: Submission of contributions by the public to the companies

2. Selection: Selection of the most favorable and attractive contributions/submissions

Methodology

This research applied qualitative method to explore the consumer co-creation in retailing, and study the influence of consumer’s behavior on retailing’s  strategy. According to  Neuman (2013), qualitative research is kind of scientific research of observation to collet non-numerical data, which includes investigations that pursues answers to a question, or systematically utilize a predefined set of procedures to answer the question. In this research, a set of semi-structured interview were undertaken to conduct this research questions:XXXXX Fylan (2005) indicated that semi-structured interviews include various essential questions to help define the explored areas, moreover, semi-structured interviews also allow interviewers or respondents to disagree in order to seek ideas or responses in more detail. The flexibility of this approach, especially when compared to structured interviews, allows for the discovery or elaboration of data which is essential to the respondents.

Some social researcher, especially oral historians have doubted the relative effectiveness of interviewing as a method of information collecting and the degree to which it could disclose the truths or facts about the research interest areas. (Grele 1998; Rubin 1999; Thomson 2006). Nevertheless, Reed (et al, 2009) indicated that the technique of interviewing is valuable in collecting in-depth insights, and gathering subjective data which could not be garnered from other sources. In addition, semi-structured interviews is a more open-ended and exploratory method than a questionnaire in a survey which is designed to examine theory based hypotheses and models (Fylan, 2005).

In the context of this research, The purpose of this methodology was for the interviewer to guide interviewees, asking and encouraging them to continue answering and describing their opinions and the influence of consumer co-creation on retailing debate and the role of consumers in co-creation, until interviewees arrived at value statements.

Data Collection

This research adopted purposeful sampling strategy to collect four participants who are chosen based on pre-selected criteria who have co-creation experience in order to explore the explore research question. The table 1 has shown the four participants’ characteristics.

Table 1. participants’ characteristics

Gender        Age       Marital status       Income

Participant 1  male       25   single     $3500 per month

Participant 2  male       32   married  $5000 per month

Participant 3  female    26   single     $2500 per month

Participant 4  female    35   married  $5200 per month

Before this interview conducted, these four participants are informed to study details. Moreover, the interviewer have ensured ethical principles including anonymity and confidentiality, which could rises the likelihood of participants’ honesty. 4 appropriate interviewees were communicated through email. Participants’ real names were coded to guarantee anonymity. On foundation of proposition of the previous literature review, data and information were organized around five codes as shown below:

Motives

Product development and innovation

B2C interaction/relationship

Role of consumers

Benefit

These five codes were chosen with an observation to exploring this research question, therefore, in order to understanding the consumers’ motives benefits and models for participating in collaborating co-creation. Codes were organized into groups and next analyzed adopting theoretical exploration, aiming at identifying patterns and frequency of concepts (Sekaran and Bougie, 2010), which assisted to discuss findings and conduct preliminary conclusions.

With regard to developing interview questions, this research utilized open-ended questions to obtain lengthy and descriptive answers to avoid close-ended questions. The questions in interview were short and specific. The main questions in the interview contains:

Do you have experience in developing and influencing products or services of some brand?

What motivate you to get involved in cooperating with retailers?

How do you feel about participating in the collaborating with retailers?

What profits will you and retailers get with the process of co-creation to develop products or services?

Findings and discussion

With regard to question 1, all participants illustrated that they have different experience in developing and influencing products or services. Participant 1 said he have joined the Starbucks community website to illustrate their ideas. Participant 2 said he has abundant experience on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which are crowdfunding platform for retailers to gather startup funding. In general, these campaign on crowdfunding platform are all in prepare, not entered the stage of mass production. Therefore, backers could join the design of the products. They have opportunities to communicate with retailers to illustrate their demand and thought about the products, which is the biggest feature of crowdfunding.

With purchasing and supporting these startup campaign, Participant 2 said he could designed the products as he wanted, which was an awesome purchasing experience for him. Participant 3 said he was a big fan of LEGO, he always submits his own designs of new sets on the LEGO Ideas which is an online community. Participant 4 said she has submit videos and pictures to support Coca-Cola online marketing campaigns called Energizing refreshment.

Question 1. How do you feel about participating in the collaboration with retailers?

Answer from participants 1: the experience of collaborating with Starbucks were excellent. The company gave a chance for us to involve the company through online community, our ideas were valued and I have seen that the company do put their best in action to realize our fans’ ideas. Through this way, I can feel the appreciate from the company to their customers. In addition, I was happy and pleasure to join the collaborating with retailers, once my suggestions were adopted by the retailers, I would feel very excited and satisfied with the retailer, and be more interested in the update products and services, and I might be more willing to spend my money on it.

Answer from participant 3: more and more retailers and customers have focused on differentiation, and for me, I like customizing, so with the collaboration with retailers, it is a good opportunities for consumers to express their expectation and thoughts to companies, which would help companies to provide more customizing products or services to consumers. Through this collaboration, customers as me will be willing to establish a longer relationship with retailers, moreover, I feel I am a part of companies more than a consumer. The sense of engagement make me excited and satisfied.

Through the interviews, most participants are willing to collaborate with retailors which make them satisfied, excited and rewarded. The co-creation with retailors increases their sense of engagement and sense of calling. Customers have played increasingly effective roles in creating their own value. Retailers and consumers are now working harder than ever to continually co-create to innovate and productive. Consumers are more than spender, who could be designers, monitors and creators of the retailor. On the other hand, retailers pay more attention to consumer co-creation than ever before, which help retailers to collect information and grasp the market and consumer demand.

Question 2: What motivates you to get involved in cooperating with retailers?

Answer from participant 2: I am a loyal fan of Kickstarter, which is a crowdfunding platform.

What does platform attract me most is the sense of engagement, I can join the process of product design to produce. I enjoyed the collaboration experience, moreover, what provided by the current market could not satisfied me, and I have no particularly capable or innovative, however, the collaboration with creators could satisfied my demand and curiosity.

Answer from participant 4: I join the co-creation with retailers is because of financial reward. Sometimes, I could get cash or discount for next purchase.

From the answers, it can be seen that there are various elements that motivate consumers to collaborate with retailor, which could conclude in these factors:

Financial factor, consumer are motivated to engage into co-creation with retailers because of directly or indirectly financial reward.

Hedonic factor, large amount of consumer are motivated by hedonic factor that co-creation make pleasure, interest and enjoyment to consumers.

Personal factor, according to interviewees, personal factors related to obtain reputation or status and the achievement of a sense of self-efficacy. Co-creation process increase consumers sense of belongingness and values.

Question 3: What are the challenges that come with co-creation?

Answer from participant 3, there are some technical and adaptive challenges in co-creation. Consumers are separate from each other, so it is difficult for companies to manage and select.

As customers believe their contributions to the process of co-creation is essential and unique, accepting negative response from others might result in a destructive competitive manner. The risk of dissatisfaction and leaving from consumers might increase while conflicts occur. Conflicts could rouse negative WOM or stimulate co-creative customers to cooperate with another retailers. Therefore, it is essential for retailers to establish and keep a positive sense where competition units members.

With regard to benefits to consumers and retailers, the complete co-creative process is a highly relevant and attractive for consumers, which makes a promotion and resonance benefit. Retailers would be be aware of the value proposition. Co-creation is kind of motivation as well as mission.

Conclusions, implications and limitations

Although, according Roser (et al, 2009) to in marketing theory, consumer co-creation has been utilized broadly as the form of consumer participation in the manufacture of product or brand experience, there are many researchers (Hoyer et al, 2010; OHern and Rindfleisch,

2010) adopt co-creation with consumers to design and improve new products. A diverse range of motivations including recognition, financial factors and hedonic factors are identified. Especially B2C collaboration and relationship establishing with consumers were recognized as being of great significance, provided consumers with enjoyment and entertaining, ideal for response and skills development.

This research creates a contribution in exploring customers motivations and benefits to engage in co-creation in retailers. Therefore, companies should value and encourage consumer co-creation. Moreover, this study offers several valuable insights and has potential to produce managerial suggestions also related to the design of a more efficient and engaging consumer co-creation experience in retailers, as realizing consumer motivations should assist retailers to manage expectations.

The limitations of this research refer to industry and the number of interviewees participated in. The results from this paper are generalizable, however, it is for the purpose of offering the first insight with consumer co-creation topic supported by some primary findings conducted in this research area. In future research, a great number of in-depth interviews combined with a mix research method (qualitative and quantitative) should be conducted.

References:

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