Sneakerheads and Custom Kicks: Insights into Symbolic Mass Customization

Michael Giebelhausen and Stephanie Lawson
Additional contact information
Michael Giebelhausen: Department of Marketing, College of Business, Florida State University, USA
Stephanie Lawson: Department of Marketing, College of Business, Florida State University, USA

Chapter 12 in Handbook of Research in Mass Customization and Personalization:(In 2 Volumes), 2009, pp 226-239 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: AbstractThis chapter presents an exploratory study involving a group of athletic shoe enthusiasts and their feelings towards customized footwear. These ‘sneakerheads’ demonstrate their infatuation with sneakers via activities ranging from creating catalogs of custom shoes to buying and selling rare athletic footwear online. The key characteristic these individuals share is that, for them, athletic shoes are a fundamental fashion accessory steeped in symbolism and meaning. A series of in-depth interviews utilizing the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) provide a better understanding of how issues such as art, self-expression, exclusivity, peer recognition, and counterfeit goods interact with the mass customization of symbolic products by category experts.

Keywords: Mass Customization; Personalization; Engineer-to-Order; Open Innovation; User Co-Creation; Modularity; Platform Design; Customer Centricity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789814280280_0012 (application/pdf)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789814280280_0012 (text/html)
Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

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:wsi:wschap:9789814280280_0012

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in World Scientific Book Chapters from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().