Individual differences in consumer value for mass customized products

Abstract

Mass customized products, compared with mass marketed alternatives, offer advantages for optimizing performance outcomes, improving aesthetic appeal, and matching products' symbolic meanings with consumers' expressive desires. Despite having identified these value drivers for mass customized products, extant research has not connected those value drivers to individual differences among consumers. As a result, researchers' and practitioners' abilities to predict consumer value for mass customized products remain limited. This study advances and tests a model of individual differences associated with the perceived value of a customized product and mediated by involvement and perceived risk. A field survey administered to a sample of 240 participants provided data to test the model. Path analysis using structural equations modeling suggests that consumer value for mass customized products differs according to individual differences in need for uniqueness, need for optimization, and centrality of visual product aesthetics. Results also suggest that product category involvement and perceived risk are informative theoretical perspectives from which to study consumer value for mass customized products. The findings hold implications for how firms should approach the design of mass customization toolkits and how they should structure marketing communications promoting mass customized products.

Beauty or function? How different mass customization toolkits affect customers' process enjoyment

“…Our results suggest that the type of MC toolkit serves as a significant antecedent of customers' process enjoyment. We further contribute to the literature by investigating the effect of individual differences in MC (Randall et al, ; Chang et al, ; Hunt et al, ). Specifically, our results suggest that the extent to which customers have the necessary skills and knowledge available for customizing a product significantly influences their enjoyment of the MC process.…”

The role of personal relevance in the value creation process of edutainment consumption

“…Similarly, some research also suggests that whether or not transient feelings affect judgment is dependent on the relevance of the feeling to the judgment at hand (Gorn, Goldberg, & Basu, 1993;Pham, 1998). Various individual differences have been shown to have an impact on the type of benefits perceived and, in turn, lead to differential perceived value of a product (Hunt, Radford, & Evans, 2013). This contingent view suggests that people do not invariably use feelings as bases for their judgments or evaluations.…”

The Effect of Stylistic Product Information on Consumers’ Aesthetic Responses

“…People with high CVPA base their ratings of product quality to a greater extent on a product's design (Orth, Campana, & Malkewitz, ) and are more discriminating in their evaluations of a product's design (Bloch et al., ) than people with low CVPA. Further, compared to consumers with low CVPA, consumers with high CVPA are more involved in symbolic product benefits (Hunt, Radford, & Evans, ) and are more emotionally affected by a product's visual appeal (Kumar & Garg, ).…”