The Antecedents And Effects Of Customer Participation

Along with the arrival of the experience economy ages,customer experience has beenpaid more and more attention.With the focus on customer experience,customer participationhas been more and more important because of the new role of customer in the cocreationmanagement philosophy under which customer has been looed as an important innovatingforce and source of competitive Advantages. But the theoretical research on the antecedentsand consequence of customer participation was not yet deep enough and many problems needto be solved.,especialy that of consumer participation in business market.Under above mentioned backgrounds,this paper established a research framework aboutcustomer participaton in the perspective of vallue cocreation on the service-centred dominanttheory, uniquness theory, optimum stimulation level theory,perceived risk theory,socialidentity theory and perceived value theory.Then, it studied on the antecedents andconsequences of customer participation in the case of incentive travel of China usinginterview,content analysis and emperical study.The interview showed that need for uniqueness,perceived risk,trust and customerknowledge,were the antecedents of organizational buyer’s customer participation,andorganizational buyer’s customer value was composed of functional benefit,symbolic benefitand perceived cost.The emperical study showed that consumer participation of organizational buyer werecomposed of CPI(Customer Participation as an Information Resource) and CPC(CustomerParticipation as a Codeveloper).Secondly,it showed that the antecedents of customerparticipation mainly included customer demands and customer abilities.In this paper need foruniqueness,perceived risk and trust were used for measuring the customer participationdrivers of customer demands,and customer knowledge was used for measuring the customerparticipation drivers of customer abilities. At last, the results showed that there wassignificant positive correlation between customer participation and customer values.Customerparticipation can not only improve the customer’s functional and symbolic benefits, but alsocan decrease customer’s perceived cost.The content analyse showed that need for uniqueness was an important antecedents oforganizational participation which can be tested by the construction and experssion ofcoperate cultrue.The major contribution were as follows:Firstly, this paper studied on the customer participation in B2B market from the case of Chineses incentive travel. Theoretical and empirical study on the antecedents andconsequence of organization client’s customer participation behaviour which enriches andexpands the theories and empirical research in the field of B2B marketing,customerparticipation and customer value.Secondly,need for uniqueness was an important antecedents of customer participation inB2C market.However,if organizational buyer had this need was not yet clearlyanswered.This research found the organizational buyer had the need for uniqueness and canbe measured by the shaping and expressing of corporate culture in empirical study which hadimportant theoretical value for the future research on the organization client’s participationneeds.At last,this paper concluded the productive nature of incentive travel was realized by thesymbolic signs of “spirit-charging”“insider culture”“collective consciousness”and “powerposition” which made incentive travel being a Ritual full of symbolic signs which enrichedand expanded the theories of corporate ritual and application scope of Sociology ritual theory.