One-of-a-kind products: Leveraging strict uniqueness in mass customization

Franziska Krause, Jonas Görgen, Emanuel de Bellis, Nikolaus Franke, Pia Burghartz, Ilse-Maria Klanner and Gerald Häubl

International Journal of Research in Marketing, 2023, vol. 40, issue 4, 823-840

Abstract: This research examines product uniqueness in its most pure form—products that are literally one of a kind. It does so in mass customization (MC) settings where consumers configure their own products. Due to extremely large solution spaces that are typically available in MC, a specific product configured by a consumer is often one of a kind in that it has never been produced before. How might firms leverage such strict product uniqueness to enhance consumer value? A natural way of doing so is to simply inform consumers that the product they have configured is one of a kind—through a feedback message that is either present-oriented (e.g., “this specific product has never been produced before”) or future-oriented (e.g., “this product will remain one of a kind in perpetuity”). Evidence from five experiments, including a large-scale field experiment, shows that one-of-a-kind feedback can cause a substantial increase in consumers’ product valuation. This value-enhancing effect of one-of-a-kind feedback specifically occurs in product domains that are primarily matters of subjective taste. By contrast, such feedback tends to reduce consumers’ product valuation in domains that are primarily matters of objective quality. These findings advance our understanding of the concept of product uniqueness, and of how firms can harness the one-of-a-kindness of mass-customized products to unlock consumer value.

Keywords: Mass customization; One-of-a-kindness; Product uniqueness; Automated feedback; Subjective taste; Objective quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167811623000186
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ijrema:v:40:y:2023:i:4:p:823-840

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijresmar.2023.04.002

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Research in Marketing is currently edited by Roland Rust

More articles in International Journal of Research in Marketing from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().