Consumer Motivations in relation to Mass Customisation - part 2

In addition to my last blog entry it should be said that Zinkhan et al.'s use of motives was based on the work of McClelland (1961; 1987) and Snyder and Fromkin (1980). However, the utilitarian need was added by Zinkhan et al. as it was deemed relevant by them.

During my research I discovered that there was a gap in the Mass Customisation literature as there was a lack of exploratory studies on customers’ motivations and attitudes towards mass customised products. This was what motivated me to research this topic further. Zinkhan et al.’s study was a very good foundation for my study as they used a projective technique in order to research hidden motives of people to create a website. In the first part of my research I attempted a similar study as Zinkhan et al. in order to find out what hidden motives existed in a Mass Customisation setting. I used a cartoon test to picture a person wearing a mass customised T-shirt and asked people to fill in the blank space of a speech bubble. The person wearing the customised T-shirt is thinking that she is very happy with this T-shirt. A second person says that she is wondering why the person in the customised T-shirt is so happy about wearing it. The third person's sentence starts with 'I guess it is because...'. At this stage people are asked to fill in their own thoughts on this. This was to give me an insight into the motives that played a role here. 

Other questions were also present on the questionnaire, i.e. such to determine the demographic information and questions on the internet usage of participants. More details on the results of the first part of this study will follow.