CONSUMER INNOVATIVENESS

Defining Customer Innovation

I often get asked what I mean when I use the phrase "Customer Innovation". Here's my explanation:

Customer innovation incorporates a number of emerging concepts and practices that help organisations address the challenge of growth in the age of the empowered and active customer (both business and consumer). It demands new approaches to innovation and strategy-making that emphasise rapid capability development, fast learning, ongoing experimentation and greater levels of collaboration in value-creation. Customer innovation impacts upon all the following activities, functions and disciplines: 

Marketing strategy and management
Brand strategy and management
Communications strategy
Customer experience design and delivery
Customer relationship management
Customer service design and quality management
Market-sensing and customer learning
Market and customer segmentation
Creativity and knowledge management including market research
Partner and customer collaboration
Organisational alignment and purpose (values, behaviour and beliefs)
Innovation strategy and management
Innovation valuation, measurement and prioritisation
Strategy-making

For me customer innovation is not only an important perspective on value-creation but a whole new strategy discipline that organisations must embrace if they are to pursue growth successfully in the future. Put another way, customer innovation impacts the fundamental means by which value is created and growth sustained.

One of the difficulties I encounter when explaining the concept is that the "Innovation" word is traditionally associated with products and technology. There is a section in The Only Sustainable Edge by Hagel and Seely Brown that eloquently defines Innovation from a much broader organisational and strategic perspective:

We underscore the importance of innovation but we use the term more broadly than do most executives. Executives usually think in terms of product innovation as in generating the next wave of products that will strengthen market position. But product-related change is only one part of the innovation challenge. Innovation must involve capabilities; while it can occur at the product and service level, it can also involve process innovation and even business model innovation, such as uniquely recombining resources, practices and processes to generate new revenue streams. For example, Wal-Mart reinvented the retail business model by deploying a big-box retail format using a sophisticated logistics network so that it could deliver goods to rural areas at lower prices.

Innovation can also vary in scope, ranging from reactive improvements to more fundamental breakthroughs... One of the biggest challenges executives face is to know when and how to leap in capability innovation and when to move rapidly along a more incremental path. Innovation, as we broadly construe it, will reshape the very nature of the firm and relationships across firms, leading to a very different business landscape.

 Example for consumer innovativenss

The projected sales potential for Internet commerce indicates that businesses must understand those consumer characteristics that will influence consumer adoption of this medium for shopping. An empirical study conducted here (n = 403) investigates the extent to which open-processing (more general innovativeness) and domain-specific innovativeness explain the conditions under which consumers move from general Internet usage to a product purchase via the Internet. The results of our study find that generally higher amounts of Internet use (for non-shopping activities) are associated with an increased amount of Internet product purchases. Importantly, however, this relationship is moderated by domain-specific but not general innovativeness. Implications for business practice and academic research are provided.

Compulsive Consumption Consumer

O'Guinn & Faber (1989:148) defined compulsive consumption as “a response to an uncontrollable drive or desire to obtain, use or experience a feeling, substance or activity that leads an individual to repetitively engage in a behaviour that will ultimately cause harm to the individual and/or others.” Research has been carried out to provide a phenomenological description to determine whether compulsive buying is a part of compulsive consumption or not. The conclusion reached after analysing both qualitative and quantitative data stated that compulsive buying resembles many other compulsive consumption behaviours like compulsive gambling, kleptomania and eating disorders (O' Guinn & Faber, 1989:147). Hassay & Smith (1996) hold a similar view and refer to compulsive buying as a form of compulsive consumption as well. Besides personality traits, motivational factors also play a significant role in determining the similarities between compulsive buyers and normal consumers. According to O'Guinn & Faber (1989:150), if compulsive buying is similar to other compulsive behaviours it should be motivated by “alleviation of anxiety or tension through changes in arousal level or enhanced self-esteem, rather than the desire for material acquisition.” Hassay & Smith (1996) also agree with the above inference and concluded from their research that “compulsive buying is motivated by acquisition rather than accumulation.” 

Example Compulsive Consumption Consumer

Another form of compulsive personality is compulsive buying disorder. Compulsive buying is different from regular consumers and different from hoarding because it is about the process of buying.It is not about the items bought. In fact, these items are usually never used and are just put away.They are only bought purely for the sake of buying. People who are addicted to buying describe it as a high or say that it gives them a buzz.Often, when someone suffering from this is depressed, they will go out and buy items to make themselves feel better. However, compulsive buying has negative effects which include financial debt, psychological issues, and interpersonal and marital conflict.To those who suffer from compulsive buying, to them, the act is the same as using a drug.

Consumer Ethnocentrism

Consumer ethnocentrism gives individuals an understanding of what purchases are acceptable to the in-group, as well as feelings of identity and belonging. For consumers who are not ethnocentric, or polycentric consumers, products are evaluated on their merits exclusive of national origin, or possibly even viewed more positively because they are foreign (Shimp & Sharma, 1987; Vida & Dmitrovic, 2001).Brodowsky (1998) studied consumer ethnocentrism among car buyers in the U.S. and found a strong positive relationship between high ethnocentrism and country-based bias in the evaluation of automobiles. Consumers with low ethnocentrism appeared to evaluate automobiles based more on the merits of the actual automobile rather than its country of origin. Brodowsky suggests that understanding consumer ethnocentrism is critical in understanding country of origin effects.Several antecedents of consumer ethnocentrism have been identified by various studies. Consumers who tend to be less ethnocentric are those who are young, those who are male, those who are better educated, and those with higher income levels (Balabanis et al., 2001; Good & Huddleston, 1995; Sharma et al., 1995).Balabanis et al. found that the determinants of consumer ethnocentrism may vary from country to country and culture to culture. In Turkey, patriotism was found to be the most important motive for consumer ethnocentrism. This, it was theorized, was due to Turkey's collectivist culture, with patriotism being an important expression of loyalty to the group.

 Example for consumer ethnocentrism
for example ethnocentrism  is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it. He further characterized it as often leading to pride, vanity, beliefs of one's own group's superiority, and contempt of outsiders.Robert K. Merton comments that Sumner's additional characterization robbed the concept of some analytical power because, Merton argues, centrality and superiority are often correlated, but need to be kept analytically distinct.Anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski argued that any human science had to transcend the ethnocentrism of the scientist. Both urged anthropologists to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in order to overcome their ethnocentrism. Boas developed the principle of cultural relativism and Malinowski developed the theory of functionalism as guides for producing non-ethnocentric studies of different cultures. The books The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia, by Bronisław Malinowski, Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict, and Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead (two of Boas's students) are classic examples of anti-ethnocentric anthropology.

sumber :
http://chrislawer.blogs.com/chris_lawer/2005/10/defining_custom.html
 http://www.businessteacher.org.uk/free-marketing-essays/compulsive-buying/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_ethnocentrism