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The topic of this week is engaging customers and prosumers. First I will summarize the three articles that are related to the subject and afterwards I will give two examples that illustrate the subject. Tomorrow I will compare the pros and cons of these examples in class.
The first article is Co-Creation: Toward a taxonomy and an integrated research perspective, written by V. Zwass (2010). This article discusses the fact that co-creation has become a major force in the marketplace. The definition of co-creation how it is defined by Zwass is the participation of consumers along with producers in the creation of value in the marketplace.
My opinion about co-creation is that it might bring possibilities for companies to grow. If a particular company truly listens to the ideas and specific wishes of their customers and are able to implement this in a way of mass customization, it will create products which fulfill the customer’s needs.
The second article is Online social interactions: A natural experiment on word of mouth versus observational learning, written by Y. Chen et al. (2011). In this article they describe the findings of their research. This research is about the influences of word of mouth (WOM) and observational learning (OL). In this study Chen et al. designed three quasi-experimental field studies to examine three issues regarding the two types of social interaction. These three issues are: differential impact on product sales, lifetime effects and interaction effect. The result of the first issue is that negative WOM has a greater impact on sales than positive WOM. The results of the second issue show that the impact of OL and WOM differs between products in their early stages and in their later stages. In the early stages the effect is significant. This means that OL and WOM might have a valuable effect on a products lifetime. The results of the third issue show a relation with the influences of OL and WOM on products in their early stage of lifetime.
I think that in these days most of the products don’t last longer than two years due to OL. Nowadays people become engaged in a type of herd behavior. For this reason companies keep innovating to produce newer and better products each year, think of Apple. So I don’t think companies focus on reducing negative OL and WOM, but keep improving their products thanks to WOM and OL.
The third article is Tweet me, friend me, make me buy, written by Giamanco et al. (2012). This article describes the importance of social media. It shows that the use of social media might create a sufficient way of customer approach. In the article the authors use an example with Twitter (Giamanco et al.).
Aimed at the topic, engaging customers and prosumers, I think the use of social media minimizes the gap between the companies and their consumers and maximizes the efficiency of customer approach.
The first example I will discuss is NikeID. NikeID is a service that is provided by Nike that allows customers to personalize their own product. The second example is the movie of the film director Paul Verhoeven. Paul Verhoeven was going to make a new movie and he wants people to help him. These are both examples of presuming, but these two are very different examples that you really cannot compare to each other in the form of competition.
See you tomorrow!
