How The Unadopting Decisions Affect The Future Customer Participation Behavior

In recent years,the role of customer participation in service innovation has been recognized by more and more industries.Prahalad and Ramaswamy(2000)found that the role of consumer had evolved from the passive viewers of the past to the active participators through systematically expounding the different stages of consumer role evolution and the main features of each stage.Prahalad and Ramaswamy(2004)also pointed out that the co-creation of value by consumers and businesses would be an important source of gaining competitive advantages in the future.With the deeper development of technology-and-information age,more and more enterprises have provided online interactive platforms that involve co-creation of value in order to adapt to service innovation.Those platforms reduced the communication barriers caused by geographical restrictions,greatly expanded the product innovation and improved the efficiency of information communication and sharing.Consumers can also use those platforms or other third-party platform media to evaluate the products,service,and even the enterprise.The pertinent evaluation not only can help expand the source of business innovation channels,but also can be used as communication media between customers and enterprise.Furthermore,it helps establish and maintain long-term good relationships between customers and business.Given this,I mainly focus on the network customer participation in this dissertation and research the value creation mechanism of the customers' participation activities.At present,most of the existing literatures either focus on using the value creation platforms to involve customers into enterprise innovation,or focus on exploring the positive impact of customer participation in value creation.As we all know,because of enterprises' own resources restrictions,it is impossible to meet all the customers' requests.If their requests did not get adoption,will it affect the customer's willingness to participate again and create negative effects?Can the customer's dissatisfaction get relief by modifying or adjusting the interactive mode between business and customers?This paper chose the well-known enterprise Lego Group as the case study object and focused on exploring the operation mechanism of those value creation platforms.Moreover,this paper focused on the unapoted cases and tried to figure out the future participation behavior to come out the following hypothesis development.In the methodology part,I used two lab experimental studies and one second data study to verify the above two research questions.First of all,the paper use two experimental designs that closely matched with the above case study to validate the hypothesis of this study.The design one focuses on the influence of two variables with the different customer participation effort levels(high effort or low effort)and the result of customer's idea being adopted or not on the dependent variable.The research results show that compared to the customers whose ideas were adopted by the company,the customers whose ideas were not used by the company will reduce their participation willingness and have lower desire to spread the positive reputation of the company in the future.In addition,the study found that the interaction of whether the customer s' creative ideas are adopted or not and their participation effort level was significant.Specifically,when the customers'product ideas and works are not adopted by the enterprise,the higher effort invested customers will have a lower future participation and willingness to spread word-of-mouth to companies.The second design focuses on the influence of two variables with the different customer participation effort levels(high effort or low effort)and different types of incentives that customers are involved(with social incentives or without incentives)on the dependent variable.The results show that when the customers' product ideas and works are not adopted by the enterprise,the higher effort invested customers will have a lower future participation.In addition,when the customer's product ideas and works are not adopted by the enterprise,compared to those who did not get any incentive,the customers who get part of the enterprise incentives will still have a certain future participation and willingness to spread word-of-mouth to companies.Then,this paper used the MyStarBucksldea.com to collect the second data to capture customer participation information to verify my hypothesis.The results show that if the previous ideas posted by consumers were not adopted by the MyStarBucksIdea.com platform,some of the customers' willingness of continuing participation would be reduced;and if the ideas were not adopted and the greater effort the customers put,the lower willingness they would continue to participate.Moreover,the negative effect can be delayed and reduced by the enterprise's incentive measures.That is,when the customer's ideas had not been adopted by the enterprise,compared to those who did not get any incentives,the customers who got incentives would still have the willingness to participate in the enterprise's interaction and share the products with their friends.