Why and When Consumers Prefer Products of User-Driven Firms: A Social Identification Account

Darren W. Dahl (), Christoph Fuchs () and Martin Schreier ()
Additional contact information
Darren W. Dahl: Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2, Canada
Christoph Fuchs: Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 3062 PA Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Martin Schreier: WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, 1020 Vienna, Austria

Management Science, 2015, vol. 61, issue 8, 1978-1988

Abstract: Companies are increasingly drawing on their user communities to generate promising ideas for new products, which are then marketed as “user-designed” products to the broader consumer market. We demonstrate that nonparticipating, observing consumers prefer to buy from user- rather than designer-driven firms because of an enhanced identification with the firm that has adopted this user-driven philosophy. Three experimental studies validate a newly proposed social identification account underlying this effect. Because consumers are also users, their social identities connect to the user-designers, and they feel empowerment by vicariously being involved in the design process. This formed connection leads to preference for the firm’s products. Importantly, this social identification account also effectively predicts when the effect does not materialize. First, we find that if consumers feel dissimilar to participating users, the effects are attenuated. We demonstrate that this happens when the community differs from consumers along important demographics (i.e., gender) or when consumers are nonexperts in the focal domain (i.e., they feel that they do not belong to the social group of participating users). Second, the effects are attenuated if the user-driven firm is only selectively rather than fully open to participation from all users (observing consumers do not feel socially included). These findings advance the emerging theory on user involvement and offer practical implications for firms interested in pursuing a user-driven philosophy.Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1999 . This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing .

Keywords: user innovation; user design; user-generated products; crowdsourcing; social identity; corporate associations; consumer preferences; open source software (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1999 (application/pdf)

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:inm:ormnsc:v:61:y:2015:i:8:p:1978-1988

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().