Während Mass Customization in vielen Industrien ein fester Bestandteil des Marketing geworden ist, besteht unter Marketingmanagern nach wie vor Unklarheit über die zugrunde liegenden Mechanismen und Stellhebel. Der Beitrag beleuchtet anhand drei übergeordneter Säulen eine Reihe wichtiger Erfolgsfaktoren.
The predominant, but largely untested, assumption in research on food choice is that people obey the classic commandments of rational behavior: they carefully look up every piece of relevant information, weight each piece according to subjective importance, and then combine them into a judgment or choice. In real world situations, however, the available time, motivation, and computational resources may simply not suffice to keep these commandments. Indeed, there is a large body of research suggesting that human choice is often better accommodated by heuristics—simple rules that enable decision making on the basis of a few, but important, pieces of information. We investigated the prevalence of such heuristics in a computerized experiment that engaged participants in a series of choices between two lunch dishes. Employing MouselabWeb, a process-tracing technique, we found that simple heuristics described an overwhelmingly large proportion of choices, whereas strategies traditionally deemed rational were barely apparent in our data. Replicating previous findings, we also observed that visual stimulus segments received a much larger proportion of attention than any nutritional values did. Our results suggest that, consistent with human behavior in other domains, people make their food choices on the basis of simple and informationally frugal heuristics.
Worldwide, more than one million people die on the roads each year. A third of these fatal accidents are attributed to speeding, with properties of the individual driver and the environment regarded as key contributing factors. We examine real-world speeding behavior and its interaction with illuminance, an environmental property defined as the luminous flux incident on a surface. Drawing on an analysis of 1.2 million vehicle movements, we show that reduced illuminance levels are associated with increased speeding. This relationship persists when we control for factors known to influence speeding (e.g., fluctuations in traffic volume) and consider proxies of illuminance (e.g., sight distance). Our findings add to a long-standing debate about how the quality of visual conditions affects drivers’ speed perception and driving speed. Policy makers can intervene by educating drivers about the inverse illuminance‒speeding relationship and by testing how improved vehicle headlights and smart road lighting can attenuate speeding.
Why does mass customization succeed in some East Asian markets but fail in others? Building on and extending prior work on uncertainty avoidance, this research suggests that providing mass customization in highly uncertainty-avoiding cultures can have negative consequences for consumers and companies, including longer configuration duration, lower conversion rates to actually purchase the customized product, and a reduced degree of sharing one’s product with other consumers. We provide support for those propositions based on two large-scale field studies involving more than 700,000 prospective car buyers in Japan and Taiwan (scoring high on uncertainty avoidance) versus China and Singapore (scoring low on uncertainty avoidance). Our findings on actual customers suggest that neglecting cross-national differences in uncertainty avoidance across East Asia puts both consumers and companies at risk due to more onerous customization experiences for consumers and substantially lower conversion for companies.
Although the end consumer is becoming increasingly important in the hearing aid market, little is known about the factors that lead consumers to choose one hearing aid brand over another. In an exploratory study, we find that consumers rely primarily on hearing care professionals, and less so on marketing communications and word of mouth, when choosing hearing aid brands. Competence emerges as the most effective characteristic of hearing care professionals, followed by their friendliness and the emphasis of product utility (vs. product features).
Trade shows (i.e., business-to-business exhibitions) and public fairs (i.e., business-to-consumer exhibitions) are an essential instrument in the marketing of goods and services. They provide vendors with a focused platform for communication and exchange with customers of different kinds (cf. Kirchgeorg 2005). The fair and trade show business itself has become an international multi-billion dollar industry (cf. Hansen 2004), in which organizers of trade shows and consumer fairs earn the biggest share of sales with exhibitors, who are paying fees for exhibition services. Like other services, trade shows and consumer fairs exhibit intangible elements and a high degree of customer integration as co-producer of perceived service quality at the point of service (cf. Parasuraman et al. 1988). Thus, public fair and trade show managers strive for high levels of exhibitor (and visitor) satisfaction in order to foster desired attitude and behavior among exhibiting companies (like, e.g., intention to buy, positive word of mouth and purchase or repurchase behavior cf. Keaveney 1995) which are positively related to financial performance (e.g., Anderson et al. 1994). The measurement and evaluation of customer satisfaction (i.e., exhibitors’ and visitors’ satisfaction) are therefore key success factors for managers of public fairs and trade shows, who need to decide how to deploy their limited resources to achieve high levels of satisfaction.
Car designers and critics often refer to car fronts as faces, thus, interpreting the lights as eyes and the grille as nose/mouth. Perceiving nonhuman objects as human is called anthropomorphizing and behavioral studies indicate that fostering this tendency in products leads to several desirable responses on the customer's side. So far, studies on this topic lack process measures in order to prove this to be the underlying mechanism leaving room for several other explanations. An fMRI study comparing the processing of female, male and car faces indicates that the general pattern of activation overlaps remarkably between human and car faces and the activation of the reward circuit is similar for female and car faces. This result points to the potential of applying laws of beauty established in the domain of human faces to car designs to increase their liking.
Why do you drive the car you drive? Its safety? Fuel economy? Low price? A study conducted in the German automobile market showed that instead of these rational sounding arguments a car’s design is the most important determinant of buying intention, willingness to pay and real sales.
