Consumer Attributions of Profit- and Customer Need-Driven Firm Motives in Coproduction Contexts

• Main Authors: Güntürkün, Pascal, Haumann, Till, Edinger-Schons, Laura-Marie, Wieseke, Jan
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Consumer behavior; Customer services; Customization; Technological change
• ISSN: 0098-9258

In the last two decades, technological advancements have stimulated many firms to employ a coproduction concept, in which customers play a more active role in the creation of goods and services (Stadler and Bolton 2019; Vargo and Lusch 2016). Today, many firms engage their customers in the creation of the final offering using self-production kits (e.g., Ikea, Hello Fresh), self-service technologies (e.g., American Airlines, Walmart), or offer toolkits for product customization (e.g., Nike, Dell) (Atakan, Bagozzi, and Yoon 2014). Academics and practitioners have often praised coproduction as a win-win concept that enables firms to 1) realize cost-efficiencies and 2) better satisfy customer needs at the same time (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2000). However, recent studies and business cases reveal that coproduction does not always lead to favorable outcomes, thus indicating that the underlying mechanisms that explain when and why coproduction yields positive or negative outcomes for customer relationships are not fully understood yet (Dong and Sivakumar 2017). The present research integrates theoretical notions of the multiple inference model (Reeder et al. 2004) and the negativity bias (Baumeister et al. 2001) to suggest that customer beliefs about a firm's coproduction motives (cost/profit and customer-need motive) offer a psychological mechanism that helps to explain when and why coproduction has positive/ negative short- and long-term consequences for customer relationships. Two qualitative studies provide initial support for the notion that these two motives are highly prevalent among customers in different countries and coproduction contexts. Using a longitudinal field study and a randomized experiment, we then examine the key notion that the negative effects of attributions of profit-driven firm motives are temporally more persistent than the positive effects of attributions of customer-need driven firm motives. We further investigate how customers infer these motives based on managerial decisions related to the extent of labor customers have to contribute in the process, the degree to which they can customize the outcome, and the extent to which they can realize savings through their active engagement. Study 1 builds on a large-scale multi-wave longitudinal data set in which the subjects were customers of a multinational retailer that sells ready-to-assemble furniture. We employ a latent growth modeling approach to analyze longitudinal data at the individ