IMPACT OF CUSTOMER COCONSTRUCTION IN PRODUCT SERVICE MARKETS

This paper visits a scenario that we believe will be increasingly common in the decades ahead. It focuses its attention on an environment in which customers and producers interact where (a) society is deeply and diversely interconnected; (b) computer and information technology is widespread, accepted, and greatly used; and (c) consumer needs become increasingly ill-structured, so that consumers have only a vague perception of the product they need. We have proposed that organizations would need to gear up, at the very least, to allow for (a) rapid prototyping of the product as delineated through the customer-producer coconstructive activity and (b) customer experimentation with the product so that customers can see the manner in which the product will interface with their world and alter it. We also discuss how the structure of our organizations will be radically altered by the integration of the customer as the coconstructor of the product. We revisit several notions on the management of marketing, design, operations, and risk; we discuss concepts, such as product innovation life cycle, risk sharing, and process promotion, that need to be incorporated within the organizational processes to effectively meet future customer demands. © 1991.