Research On The Relations Of Customer Innovation, Psychological Ownership And Referral Behavior

With the development of digital media and social media, the range of information asymmetry between customers and enterprises is getting smaller and smaller. The communication between customers and enterprises, customers and other customers are getting more convenient and frequent. Nowadays, the age of product-centric has passed; the age of customer-centric is changing; and the age of humanities-centric era is coming. In the new era, the products and services are required not only to meet customers’basic needs, but also to reach their inner experience. Along with these changes in customer demands, customer innovative activities emerged. Theoretical researches and practical experiences show that customer innovation would not only make the economic benefits to the enterprises, but also offer hidden benefits beyond the innovation outcomes, but these potential values have not yet attained enough attention in academic and business circles.The development of social media shows the powerful force of customers’WOM, it is vital for enterprises to exert a positive influence on customers’ WOM from source. As we know from some customer innovative practices, the sense of participation can effectively promote innovative customers’ WOM spreading on the basis of self-experience. Therefore, it is of great significance to find the source of customers’WOM from the perspective of customer innovation. To further explore the relationship between customer innovation and referral behavior, and analyze the psychological changes of innovative customers after finishing the innovation tasks, then the spontaneous referral behavior of innovative customer can be better explained. Starting from the point of social psychology, the theory of psychological ownership is introduced to the model of customer innovation and referral behavior. Moreover, this study will investigate the factors that affect the mental processes based on this.On the basis of theoretical analysis, combined with practical experience, we build a relationship model between customers innovation and referral behavior, and to explore the mediating role of psychological ownership and the moderating role of customer perceived competency as well as the degree of result-preference fit. Base on this model, we propose six research hypotheses. Drawing on relevant research, this study makes questionnaire and use web-based survey and field survey to collect data. SPSS 17.0 and LISREL 8.7 are used to analyze data. Based on this, we adopt correlation analysis, hierarchical regression analysis to validate the model and research hypotheses.The results show that customer innovation have significant positive influence on referral behavior and customer psychology ownership; customer psychology ownership has significant positive influence on referral behavior; Customer psychological ownership plays an partial mediating role between customer innovation influences and referral behavior; Customer perceived competency has a significant moderating influence on the psychological effect of innovative customers; the effect of degree of results-preference fit has not been verified. Finally, the corresponding management recommendations and future research prospects are proposed according to the research results.