Consumer Motivations in relation to Mass Customisation - part 1

Wow, it has been a while. I was so focused on my research that I didn't even get to update this Blog. However, the research has been successfully completed and I was able to make some interesting observations.

The article by Zinkhan et al. (1999), which I had mentioned in my last post was used as a basis for my research study. Their study was based on the US market, whereas mine focused on Europe. Furthermore, their study focused on people's motivations to create a personal website, whereas my study focused on people's willingness to customise products such as a T-shirt.
However, Zinkhan et al.'s use of motivational theories and the motives in general was reaching much further than the mostly initial studies of people's motives within the Mass Customisation field. Therefore, Zinkhan et al.'s study was deemed a very good starting point for this research. The motives that were at the center of this research were the need for uniqueness, achievement, affiliation, power and the utilitarian need.
Nevertheless, Zinkhan et al.'s study did not include one additional motive, which was deemed important in studies on Mass Customisation (Fiore et al. 2004; Schreier 2006): the experiential need.

In order to carry out the research on people's motivations to customise their products two methods were chosen: the questionnaire and semi-structured interviews.
Furthermore, the participants were divided into four groups: Irish females, non-Irish females, Irish males and non-Irish males. I was then able to compare the results from the four groups and make gender-specific or country-specific observations.

The results for this research study will follow in the next post.