Ambient Value Creation

To provide greater value to consumers it can be beneficial to support ambient value creation, i.e. value creation that is specifically tailored to variations in consumer’s usage situations. An important condition for this type of value creation may be to allow consumers to interact with firms or other consumers across in many different locations and in many different ways. For example, when consumers buy food, producers may allow consumers to access recipe suggestions in the store, in their kitchen, in their friend’s kitchen, to contact peers to provide practical tips on to process the product, etc.

In this research domain we investigate what key (channel, content, and product) benefits consumers look for in different usage situations. Theory and methods are developed to better understand consumers’ mental representations of different usage situations, and how variations in mental representations drive consumers’ preferences for different (media) channels, products, and activities.

Related PhD Projects

Mirjam van Ginkel-Bieshaar, Erasmus University Rotterdam, project: “Consumer Evaluations of Health Products.”

Tim Benning, Erasmus University Rotterdam, project: “Consumer Acceptance of Individualized Allocation Mechanisms for Scarce Service Resources.”

Oliver Horeni, Eindhoven University of Technology, project: “Measuring Mental Representations of Complex Decisions,” jointly supervised with Theo Arentze and Harry Timmermans

Co-Authors Working on Related Topics

Theo Arentze, Urban Planning Group, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, Eindhoven University of Technology

Ko de Ruyter, Department of Marketing, Maastricht University