The Phase 2 Interview Results - part 2


One major research focus of this study was the participants' experience with Mass Customisation and their understanding of the concept, which I elaborated on in my last blog entry. Another focus of this study was the participants' willingness to pay for these customised products.

The interviews revealed that the average that participants were willing to pay more for customised products was 37.5%. This result lies significantly below some previous willingness to pay research. For example, Franke and Piller (2004, Journal of Product Innovation Management) found in their study that people who were able to customise their watches using a design toolkit were willing to pay 100% more for this product. Similarly, Schreier's studies (2006, Journal of Consumer Behaviour) on customised cell phone covers, T-shirts and scarves also revealed an average willingness to pay 100% extra for these products. 

One possible explanation for the low result in this study could be that only female participants where included in the interviews. This was due to their low outcome of  previous customisation of products as it was found in the questionnaires. On the other hand male participants were not only more involved in customisation, the questionnaires also revealed that they had customised more expensive products than the female participants. This means that the average willingness to pay could have been higher, if male participants had been included. Furthermore, this was a relatively limited study as the number of participants in the interviews was quite low. 

The literature review, which was carried out before the data was gathered showed that the advance in technology played a major role in the development of Mass Customisation. Particularly the internet is an important medium in the marketing process as well as the creation of customised products by the customer using toolkits. Therefore, it was seen as important to consider the online activity of the participants in this study. In this connection Dellaert and Dabholkar (2009, International Journal of Electronic Commerce) explored the effect of complimentary online services on people's perceptions of the product outcome, which was found to be of a positive nature. These online-services included online salesperson advise, a visualization tool that showed customers their finished product and free product adaptation (such as a flexible return policy). In this study the idea was used to find out, if it had any effect on customers' willingness to purchase mass customised products. First it should be said that it was found in the questionnaires that the Irish females were the only group that preferred shopping online compared to shopping in a store. In the interviews this result was confirmed with the Irish participants being the more frequent internet shoppers. For them the visualisation tool was slightly more important, whereas the flexible return policy was more important for the non-Irish group. However, due to the small number of participants in the interviews this cannot be generalised and further research is required. Nevertheless, the online salesperson interaction was found to be less significant for both groups. It is certainly of interest to explore the reason for this outcome in the future.