Consumer-Producer Interaction: A Strategic Analysis of the Market for Customized Products

This paper focuses on the process by which consumers and producers interact to create better value for consumers. This happens in many situations but is arguably most prominent in mass-customization, an area that has recently gained a lot of popularity among manufacturers (Business Week, March 20, 2000). In terms of communications, such interaction entails a shift from the one-way communication (usually from seller to buyer) of traditional markets, to a two-way communication. Specifically, potential producers need to elicit preference (and other) information from consumers. They then have to provide a product that correctly incorporates such information. This brings up many strategic issues. In particular, we are interested in answering the following questions: (1) What is the 'economic value' of consumers' information? (2) Are there any strategic implications for producers, if they depend on consumer input and have to pay for consumers' information? (3) In what way does pricing for customized products differ from pricing for similar standardized products? (4) Is the strategic relationship between consumers and producers different in the market for customized goods as compared to more traditional markets? The main contribution of this paper is to bring into focus the issues surrounding mass-customization via an analysis of consumer-producer interaction, which is the facilitating process. This paper is the first attempt in marketing to analytically model this emerging area and should be of interest to academics. Practitioners should be interested in the marketing and strategic perspective on mass-customization that this paper adopts. The trade press has approached mass-customization from a manufacturing/production cost angle, while its marketing implications have largely been left open (Wind and Rangaswamy, 2000). To answer the above questions we build a game-theoretic model, which analyses the interaction between consumers and producers in an agency-theoretic framework. The main features of our model are the following. Consumers vary in their desire for customization, with some consumers having a higher need for and willingness to pay for customized goods. Producers vary in the ability to 'successfully customize' according to consumer specifications. Producers first solicit consumers' suggestions/preferences and attempt to screen consumers who are willing to pay for customized products (stage 1: 'Information market'). They then try to provide a product, which correctly incorporates consumers' input and set prices for such customized products (stage 2: 'Product market'). The main question for consumers at this stage is whether the producer has been able to successfully incorporate their input given in the first stage. We start first with the monopoly case to isolate the strategic issues in consumer-producer interaction. Later we incorporate competition between firms. In the latter case, both the information market (where firms compete for consumers' information) and the product market (where firms compete to sell the final product) come into their own and have interesting interactions. We find that, in equilibrium, firms will pay consumers for their information in the first stage. Intuitively, consumers provide costly input, but any commitment by the firm to provide surplus through a lower price of the product in the second stage, lacks commitment. Moreover, the producer's payment can act as a signal of high quality for the skillful customizer who tries to separate from a 'ghost firm', which cannot customize well. Under monopoly, the price of customized products is the same as that of non-customized products, contrary to common wisdom as reflected in the trade press (Anderson, 1997). Thus, our analyses could explain why some manufacturers find that they cannot charge a premium for customized products (Wind and Rangaswamy, 2000). We find that equilibrium prices of customized products are at the high end of the price range for similar non-customized products, consistent with casual observation.Under duopoly, when firms compete for consumers' information, the prices of customized products are in fact less than the price of non-customized products. This counter-intuitive result occurs because firms try to avoid being heldup by consumers who may withhold purchase, after first getting the firm to produce a very individually tailored product which the firm might not be able to sell to other consumers. Since, first stage competition for information gives consumers a high price for their information, it increases their incentive to holdup the firm. The firm, therefore, has to charge a lower price to induce consumers to purchase the product.Finally, we show that, in the market for customized goods (stage 2), consumers can be better off with less competition between firms. When firms compete in the product market in the second stage, they earn less equilibrium profits. Thus, they compensate consumers less for their information in the first stage, and this may yield consumers less overall utility. This finding could be of interest to manufacturers who increasingly attempt to build deep, long lasting ties with consumers. Often such ties are perceived as conflicting with the consumers' desire to retain the flexibility to compare and opt for the offerings of different producers. Our results suggest that such misalignment of interests need not exist, at least in the market for customized goods

Waiting for a sales renaissance in the fourth industrial revolution: Machine learning and artificial intelligence in sales research and practice

Experts have suggested that the next few decades will herald the fourth industrial revolution. The fourth industrial revolution will be powered by digitization, information and communications technology, machine learning, robotics and artificial intelligence; and will shift more decision-making from humans to machines. The ensuing societal changes will have a profound impact on both personal selling and sales management research and practices. In this article, we focus on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) and their impact on personal selling and sales management. We examine that impact on a small area of sales practice and research based on the seven steps of the selling process. Implications for theory and practice are derived

What I Thought I Wanted? Miswanting and Regret for a Standard Good in a Mass-Customized World

How can a standardized product survive in a mass-customized world? This requires understanding that consumers often experience problems predicting their future hedonic reactions to new experiences (such as custom products), leading to feelings of regret. This form of regret occurs not because the custom product differs from specifications, but because consumers miswanted the design they ordered. Our analytic model shows that regret aversion induces consumers to design custom products to reflect the attributes of the available standard products. Consequently, regret-averse consumers may choose the standard product rather than place a custom order. The number of available standard products, however, moderates both these effects. Two experiments empirically substantiate the key predictions of the analytical model: (a) the custom product's resemblance to the standard product grows with regret aversion associated with miswanting, (b) there exists a segment of “regretfully loyal consumers” for the standard product in a mass-customized world and it expands with regret aversion, (c) both the above effects are weakened by the presence of a second standard product, and (d) the custom product can increase its market share when the number of standard products increases.customization, standard goods, preference uncertainty, regret

Personal selling and the purchasing function : where do we go from here?

The business-to-business selling function has changed over the years, with more informed and demanding buyers, prompting firms to move toward a more consultative, solution-selling approach. While these changes have been the focus of extensive research in the personal selling and sales management domain, the customer side of the interaction dyad requires more examination. Even within the context of the customer side, insufficient attention has been paid to the purchasing function in business-to-business (B2B) selling research. Given the increased importance in customer organizations of the purchasing function, this article presents a literature review that highlights the purchasing function's personal selling and sales management needs and argues that, as the purchasing function becomes more important and its needs evolve, personal selling and sales strategies also need to evolve. The article highlights areas for future research in this domain

Purchasing-driven sales : matching sales strategies to the evolution of the purchasing function

The personal selling field has witnessed the emergence of various sales strategies, including relationship, value, key account, and solution selling. Despite claims about their effectiveness, recent work challenges the relevance of existing sales strategies across buying contexts. Specifically, emerging sales strategies often focus on the user in the customer organization, without being explicitly aligned with the increasingly important purchasing function. To define the critical role of the purchasing function for sales effectiveness, this study collects data from 32 firms in two markets; their purchasing departments reveal four stages of purchasing evolution: passive (price focused), independent (cost-focused), supportive (solution/innovation focused), and integrative (strategy focused). The research demonstrates that each stage of purchasing evolution then requires distinct sales strategies by selling firms and any mismatch of purchasing evolution and sales strategy may be detrimental to sales. This novel view and the supported findings offers several implications for both research and practice. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Equilibrium Price Communication and Unadvertised Specials by Competing Supermarkets

This paper is concerned with how retailers, supermarkets in particular, communicate price discounts and use unadvertised specials. A common practice for supermarkets is to communicate price deals on some products through newspaper advertisements, while communicating discounts on other products through in-store mechanisms such as shelf-talkers. This raises the question: So far as store choice is concerned, how might consumers take into account not only advertised prices at competing stores, but also expected prices of unadvertised goods? It also begs the question of why stores have unadvertised specials since their effect on store choice is not quite the same as the advertised discounts. Further, competing supermarkets advertise the same products part of the time, and different products at other times. They also tend to sometimes advertise a product in consecutive weeks, but sometimes not. Can these actions be part of a strategy? We formulate a game-theoretic model of retail competition by first extending the work of Lal and Matutes (1994) and then developing an alternative framework to answer these questions. Our model has two retailers, each of whom carries two goods. To simplify exposition, we assume that the stores are symmetric, the two goods are symmetric in their reservation prices, and are neither substitutes nor complements. Consumers are identical in their preferences and consumer heterogeneity is in the convenience that each store presents to a representative consumer. The stores may advertise the price of one good, reflecting the reality that stores do not advertise their whole assortment. They compete through advertising and prices to maximize profits. We thus recognize the strategic role of advertised prices and furthermore, we investigate the strategic role of unadvertised prices in retail competition. For this model, we derive a Rational Expectations Nash equilibrium in which each store randomly advertises the price of one good following a mixed strategy. Consumer expectations of the prices of the unadvertised goods are rational. We obtain three kinds of results. First, unadvertised specials occur in equilibrium, and induce temporal and cross-sectional variation in the identity of advertised goods, consistent with casual observation. In this equilibrium, the two stores advertise the same good part of the time and different goods at other times. When they advertise the same good they do not offer any unadvertised discount on the other good. However, when they advertise different goods, they offer an unadvertised discount on the good that they do not advertise. Intuitively, unadvertised discounts come about because stores randomize the identity of the advertised good in the mixed strategy equilibrium. If retailers were to advertise the same good at all times, they would have to compete intensely for store traffic and therefore discount the advertised good very deeply. And, having done so, they would find it optimal to set the unadvertised good at the reservation price and offer no discount on it. However, if stores randomize the advertised good as shown in this paper, both stores advertise the same good some of the time and at other times they advertise different goods. Because they advertise different goods some of the time, they do not fight intensely for store traffic on just one good, but rather they find it optimal to offer a discount on the unadvertised good also. As a result, an implication of our equilibrium for consumer choice is that unadvertised discounts affect store choice, and in equilibrium some consumers may shop around. Second, we obtain managerial insights into the role of unadvertised specials. They affect store choice, prevent consumer shopping around either fully or partly, and reduce head-to-head competition on the price of the advertised good. The most salient strategic implication of retailers' offering unadvertised discounts is to reduce competition among stores, and this is again due to the randomization strategy of the stores. In fact, stores can reduce head-to-head competition further by increasing the number of products in their assortment and randomizing on the advertised good from this assortment. Third, we provide a resolution of the Diamond (1971) paradox, which says that prices at competing stores approach the monopoly price. In our equilibrium, expected prices of both advertised and unadvertised goods are always below the monopoly price.Retailing, Supermarkets, Advertising, Pricing, Unadvertised Specials, Competition, Game Theory, Consumer Choice, Rational Expectations, Diamond Paradox

On Customized Goods, Standard Goods, and Competition

In this study, we examine firms' incentive to offer customized products in addition to their standard products in a competitive environment. We offer several key insights. First, we delineate market conditions in which firms will (will not) offer customized products in addition to their standard products. Surprisingly, we find that when firms offer customized products they are able to not only expand demand, but can also the prices of their standard products relative to when they do not. Second, we find that when a firm offers customized products it is a dominant strategy for it to also offer its standard product. This result highlights the role of standard products and the importance of retaining them when firms offer customized products. Third, we identify market conditions under which ex ante symmetric firms will adopt symmetric or asymmetric customization strategies. Fourth, we highlight how the degree of customization offered in equilibrium is affected by market parameters. We find that the degree of customization is lower when both firms offer customized products relative to the case when only one firm offers customized products. Finally, we show that customizing products under competition does not lead to a prisoner's dilemma.degree of product customization, mass customization, standard products, competition, game theory