The value of a user-design strategy : the role of giving background information about the user-community and consumer characteristics

• Autor(a) principal: Osório, Mariana Ramos
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/20608
• topic: User-design; Innovation; New product development; User-community; Observing consumers; Social Identity; Self-construal; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

A growing number of companies are starting to empower their user community in order to develop new products which can be afterwards labeled as user-design to the whole market. Social Identity theory explains why observing consumers prefer to buy products from firms using those type of strategies. This experimental study aims to understand the influence of communicating that a firm relies on a community of users for developing new products. Moreover this study looks at a) the impact of giving background information about the usercommunity b) what type of consumers, depending on their type of chronically self-construal, this strategy is most suited to. Firstly results show that user-design strategy is preferred to the professional-design one, regardless how the community is described. Observing consumers report higher levels of identification with firms employing a user-design strategy which latter is translated in preference for user-design products. Secondly, results indicate that when the user-community is perceived as similar by the observing consumer, feelings of identification towards the firm increase. This effect mediates product choice. Lastly, results indicate that chronically interdependent self-construal individuals are more enthusiastic about user-design effect and show higher levels of product preference for firms using a user-design approach when compared with independent individuals. These findings provides insights that not all consumers have the same preference for a user-design strategy which is relevant for managers wanting to involve user communities in new product development.