Customer Co-creation as a Process of Collective Action: Marketing’s Role in Bridging Heterogeneous Customer Involvement

Abstract

In this paper, the author proposes a research viewpoint which comprehends the customer co–creation process as collective action, by examining the case of Elephant Design, the developer of the Design-to-Order (DTO) business model. DTO is unique in that co-creation includes not only the idea-generation process but also the process of commercialization. A far-reaching scale of customer involvement is required to meet the production quota. The author applies the concept of collective consumption to the co-creation theory in order to analyze the role of heterogeneous voting clusters. In keeping with this year’s conference theme, “The Customer is Not Always Right,” the paper focuses on marketing’s new role in bridging heterogeneous customer clusters, which otherwise remain disconnected.