Customers As Co-Producers

This chapter highlights the extent of customer participation in a firm's core business processes and/or value chain activities and their implications for enhancing the effectiveness of marketing strategy and efficiency of marketing operations. The growing interest in the role of customers as co-producers is a consequence of the emergence of standardized and inexpensive communication networks. The chapter explains the overview of marketing strategy effectiveness and marketing operations efficiency. It discusses the link-ages between mass production and mass customization and customers as service recipients and customers as service co-producers. The chapter proposes a conceptual model delineating factors affecting the intensity of customer involvement with the firm. Cost leadership strategy refers to a business leveraging its skills and resources to achieve a defensible position of competitive cost advantage in the marketplace. The success of mass customization strategy was impeded by the absence of mechanisms for interacting with customers and obtaining information about their specific needs and of flexibility.