About

More and more, firms work closely together with their customers in the value creation process. This website combines academic insights from research at Erasmus University Rotterdam with examples of research and business practices worldwide to analyze such customer value chains. The theory, analyses, and examples are relevant to researchers and students interested in business models and strategies such as multi-channel marketing, co-creation, user-generated content, mass-customization, personalization, and viral marketing. Managers who wish to integrate customers in their business strategy may find useful new ideas, examples, and methods.

Consumer Decision Aids

The rapid developments in information and communication technology now allow firms to closely integrate consumers in the value creation process. Many firms allow their customers to tailor products or services to their own taste (e.g., in the apparel, financial services, and high tech industries). Other firms use consumer input to provide in-depth information about the products that they sell (e.g., in user forums in the health and entertainment industries). To be successful these business models often use a multi-channel approach and strongly rely on information technology to interact with consumers.

One particularly promising way to assist consumers in creating greater value is to support interactions that are specifically tailored to different consumer’s usage situations. Therefore, firms are increasingly challenged to harmonize and support consumer-interactions across many different locations, channels, and services. We therefore investigate how consumers’ mental representations of decision problems vary across different consumption situations and in turn drive their preferences for different (media) channels, products, and activities.

More specifically, two key questions guide our analyses: (1) How can firms best support individual consumers to improve their decision-making and enhance their consumption experiences, and (2) How can firms best empower consumers to allow them to be co-creators of value in the supply chain?

Social Media

Social media are a tremendous asset for understanding and investigating customer behaviour. Customers have embraced modern information technology to communicate and perform transactions. Marketers interact with these customers who increasingly also interact with each other through platforms and applications enabled by the Web and mobile technologies (for example, weblogs, online forums, wikis, web communities, and social networking). Rather than being mere recipients of the information disseminated by marketers, customers now actively use social media to express and disseminate their own knowledge, experiences, and opinions about products and services. Firms will have less control over (the results of) their communication efforts because the involvement of these customers in the spread of information sent by firms. This will make it increasingly difficult to predict the outcomes of marketing efforts.

Firms have responded to this development by reallocating a substantial part of their marketing communication budgets to (electronic) word-of-mouth (WoM) marketing. By actively managing word-of-mouth processes they try to control these processes as much as possible and turn the new situation into their advantage. This has made WoM marketing an increasingly important type of marketing for many companies. The recent popularity of viral marketing is a case in point.

We study communication processes through social media between customers and analyze the effects of marketing activities on these processes. We focus especially on predicting how these processes will develop.

Customer Channels

Customers and firms interact in many different ways, but always through customer channels. For a single product purchase a customer might visit the company website to search for information, go to a store to buy the product, mail in the guarantee certificate and call the company for support during installation. Properly guiding customers through the most effective channels is a major challenge for many companies.

For instance, whether a given channel is an effective means for customer-firm interaction depends heavily on the customer’s stage in her purchase process. A call-centre might be effective for complaint management but will be highly inefficient for providing pricing information. Effective channel management hence requires firms to guide a single customer through a number of different channels.

Customers also differ in their preferences for the various channels. Some value the convenience of online buying; others enjoy a visit to a shopping mall. Firms therefore cannot be too restrictive in the channel structure, allowing customers to some degree to select their preferred channels.

Finally, even within a single channel a different experience can be provided to different customers. For example, websites can morph during the visit of a customer, or direct mailings can vary in their content to effectively persuade different customer segments.

Thus, the following three issues are the main focus of our research on customer channels: 1. Channel effectiveness, in particular in the purchase process, 2. Customer channel preferences, and 3. Channel content management.