Sessions
Session 12
New Ideas for Customer Interaction and Marketing for MCP
Monday Oct 5 2009
15:45-17:05
Merle, Aurélie (Grenoble School of Management, France)
St-Onge, Anik (University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada)
Senecal, Sylvain (University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada)
Do I Recognize Myself in this Avatar? An Exploratory Study of Self-Congruity and Virtual Model Personalization Levels
Among all possible advantages offered by electronic commerce to retailers, the capacity to offer consumers a personalized relationship is probably one of the most important (Wind and Rangaswamy 2001). Online personalization offers retailers two major benefits. It allows them to provide accurate and timely information to customers which, in turn, often generates additional sales (Postma and Brokke 2002). Thus, the question for retailers may then be “How much personalization should we offer consumers?” Although some research has been conducted addressing the issue of personalization extent and how it impacts consumer attitudes and responses (e.g., Ansari and Mela 2003, Song and Zinkhan 2008), to our knowledge no research has yet investigated the personalization of avatars, more specifically the personalization extent of virtual models on apparel retail websites. Thus, our research contributes to the personalization research stream by investigating how different levels of personalization influence consumers’ perceptions, attitudes, and intentions.
Merle, StOnge, Senecal -presentation pdf
Merle, StOnge, Senecal -paper pdf
Dellaert, Benedict G. C. (Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University , The Netherlands)
Häubl, Gerald (School of Business, University of Alberta, Canada)
Consumer Decision Processes in Product Search with Personalized Recommendations
We examine how personalized recommendations that present products in order of their predicted attractiveness to a consumer transform decision processes during product search. While such an ordered presentation of products is generally deemed to benefit consumers, it also poses new challenges. Specifically, with personalized recommendations, consumers may search too much and make suboptimal choices among the inspected products. We propose that this can be explained by the fact that such recommendations activate a choice orientation in searchers. Evidence from two experiments provides strong support for this perspective. When inspecting a new product with personalized recommendations, consumers tend to compare it to the entire set of previously encountered alternatives rather than only the best one among these, in line with choice from pre-defined sets rather than with sequential search. Moreover, with personalized recommendations, encountering products that are more similar in attractiveness reduces the probability of stopping the search at a given stage, which also indicates a choice orientation in that it is consistent with choice deferral, but opposite to what is commonly observed in unordered search environments.
Steiner, Frank (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
Ihl, Jan Christoph (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
Piller, Frank T. (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
Embedded Toolkits: A User Acceptance Study in the Automotive Sector
A main challenge in new product development (NPD) is to match a new design to customer preferences. Recent reviews show large failure rates in the commercialization of new designs. In most of the cases, the reason of failure has been not a lack of technological capability of the firm, but a wrong understanding of the customer needs and demands. The idea of this paper is to investigate a new approach to reduce the NPD risk by postponing some design decisions into the customer domain. Our concept of embedded toolkits for user innovation plans for manufacturers to design products with build-in flexibility by embedding knowledge and rules about possible product differentiations into the product. This shall enable users directly to modify a product according to their individual needs, freeing the manufacturer to perfectly acquire concrete customer needs before the product is designed. The objective of this paper is to study the feasibility of such an embedded open toolkit conceptually and experimentally, whereas the empirical research was conducted in the automotive sector.
Steiner, Ihl, Piller -presentation pdf
Steiner, Ihl, Piller -paper pdf
Bachvarov, Angel G. (Technical University Sofia, Bulgaria)
Maleshkov, Stojan B. (Centre for Virtual Engineerig of the Technical University Sofia, Bulgaria)
Katicic, Jurica (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)
Stoyanova, Polina
Product Individualization by the Customer through Virtual Reality Integration
The main goal of this work is to present author’s ideas and experience in providing direct customers’ participation within the modular product design and development process in form of “a pre-sale service”, based on the use of Virtual Reality. Possibilities for product individualization implementation through some recently used Virtual Reality technologies are given and discussed. Further an experimental prototype of a Virtual Reality product configurator, working in both web based and immersive virtual environments is presented.