Research On Mechanism Of Customer Value Co-creation By Suppliers And Customers

With the rise of service-dominant logic paradigm, customer value co-creation has grown considerably in unprecedented fashion, more and more enterprises co-create value with customers. But, very little is known about the process of customer value co-creation. How to co-create customer value through partnership with supplier becomes an important theoretic and practical issues. In fact, in the experience economy, more and more enterprises make experience marketing as the base of future marketing, and the customer experience becomes the core of market competition instead of goods and service. Many excellent companies, such as IBM,HP,Amazon,and HSBC etc, all emphasize the customer experience. Researches on the role of customer experience in value co-creation are relatively few, and empirical study is almost none. Existing researches on customer experience are mainly concerned with individual customer, only few researches focus on organizational users. This dissertation explores the mechanism of customer value co-creation under the circumstance of business-t-business, based on the perspective of customer experience, and investigates the impacts of lead user characteristics and relational governance of specific investment on the progress of customer value co-creation. It is beneficial to expanding the service-dominant theory and customer experience theory, and to improving the management level of customer value creation in practice.Building on review of the relevant customer value co-creation literature, this dissertation generates a framework of relationship mechanism between supplier specific investment, customer participation in service innovation, customer experience and customer value, and empirically examines the framework using collected data in order to uncover the mechanism of customer value co-creation by suppliers and customers. There are mainly six constructs in this research as follows:customer participation in service innovation, supplier specific investment, customer experience, relational norm, lead user characteristics and customer perceived value. Customer participation in service innovation refers to the level of customer involvement in innovation interaction, including four characteristics, such as formalization, long-time orientation, comprehensiveness and importance. Supplier specific investment refers to suppliers'input of specific human asset and physical asset, in the value creation for customers. Customer experience refers to customer's affective, cognitive and behavioral responses to the value co-creation in the progress of service innovation. Relational norms refer to behavioral rules that supplier and customer comply with, in order to protect the suppliers'specific investment against opportunistic threat, in the progress of customer value co-creation. Lead users are users who are at the leading edge of each identified trend in terms of related new product in the marketplace, and who expect to obtain relatively high net benefits from solutions to these needs. And also, lead users are highly creative. Customer perceived value refers to the perceived functional value and relational value that organizational customer obtain in the service innovation.All the scales are obtained from foreign literature, and these scales are integrated and adapted according to Chinese enterprises, in order to be more in line with Chinese cultural context. In view of differences in cultural background at home and abroad, this dissertation adopts operationable, multiple-indicator scales to measure those constructs in order to investigate the mechanism of customer value co-creation. To verify the issues of interest, this dissertation selects firms in Chinese software industry as typical respondents, and employs mailing, interview, and electronic mailing to collect data. Investigating validity and reliability of the measures, this research conducts hierarchical regressions and structural equation model to analyze data and test hypotheses, and obtains findings as follows:Firs, factor analysis reveals that, the level of customer involvement includes four dimensions of formalization, long-time orientation, comprehensiveness and importance. Customer experience is composed of affective experience, cognitive experience and behavioral experience. Customer value can be disaggregated into two dimensions of functional value and relational value. Supplier specific investment is constituted by two dimensions of human and physical specific investment. Relational norms and lead user characteristics cam both be measured by four items.Secondly, the four dimensions of customer participation in service innovation have different effects on customer value. Specifically, the intensity of customer involvement in interaction has significant impacts on customer relational value and functional value, but the dimension of comprehensiveness has no significant effects on functional value. And also, two dimensions of supplier specific investment all positively affect functional value and relational value.Thirdly, relational norms have different moderating impacts on the relationship between supplier specific investment and customer value. Concretely, relational norms significantly moderate the effect of supplier specific investment on relational value, but don't moderate the effect of supplier specific investment on functional value.Fourthly, lead user characteristics moderate the relationship between four dimensions of customer participation and customer value differently. In details, lead user characteristics moderate the effects of four dimensions of customer participation on functional value. And lead user characteristics moderate the impact of four dimensions of customer participation on relational value, except for the dimension of importance.Fifthly, three dimensions of customer experience mediate the supplier specific investment and customer value. Specifically, customer experience completely mediates the effect of supplier specific investment on customer relational value, and partially mediates the effect of supplier specific investment on customer functional value.Lastly, empirical results provide evidence that mediating effects of customer experience between four dimensions of customer participation and customer value are complex. Customer experience partially mediates the effects of formalization and long-time orientation on functional value, and completely mediates the effect of importance on customer functional value. Customer experience is not a mediator between comprehensiveness and functional value. And also, customer experience partially mediates the effects of long-time orientation and importance on relationship value. Customer experience completely mediates the impacts of formalization and comprehensiveness on relational value. Specific to the mediating effects of dimensions of customer experience, empirical results show that, three dimensions of customer experience are mediators between customer participation and customer value, except for the mediating effects of affective experience between formalization and dimensions of customer value, and the mediating effect of behavior experience between importance and customer value. Similarly, dimensions of customer experience are not mediators between comprehensiveness and functional value.