Mass-Customization: Segmentation Matters

Pricing Psychology: An Experiment

This presentation shows the results of an online survey I ran in May 2009 with a sample of 124 respondents (n=61 in the treatment group, n=63 in the control group). Each question describes two scenarios which are economically equivalent, but psychologically different. Some of the results are truly astonishing.

Literati Outstanding Paper Award 2009

Turning Customer Frustration into Customer Loyalty

Service Recovery: Why it does not work and what to do about it

Winner of the Best Paper Award at the 10th International Research
Seminar in Service Management, La Londe (France), 2008

Innovate Customers, not Products

Service innovations reportedly involve innovating intangible products, but this article argues for a more radical service-logic perspective that challenges the traditional, attribute-based view of innovation. Rather than innovating products and services, the focus here shifts toward innovating customers’ value co-creation roles. This article presents a case-based managerial framework that indicates service-logic innovations change the customer’s role as a buyer, payer, or user and that firms can innovate through smart offerings, different value integration approaches, and reconfigured value constellations. To download our manuscript, click here.

Citation: Michel, Stefan, Stephen W. Brown, and Andrew S. Gallan (2008), "Service-Logic Innovations: How to Innovate Customers, not Products (Forthcoming)," California Management Review, 50 (3).

Service Innovations

The service-dominant logic (S-D logic) provides a novel and valuable theoretical perspective that necessitates a rethinking and reevaluation of the conventional literature on innovation. This literature is built upon a goods-dominant logic and has resulted in a restricted and out-moded perspective that overlooks many major discontinuous innovations. In this article, we show how many innovations can be better understood by deploying a S-D logic perspective. We present six S-D logic categories of discontinuous innovation positing that they can help scholars and managers analyze, design and implement breakthrough advances in resource use. We argue that discontinuous innovation can arise by changing any of the customers’ roles of users, buyers and payers on the first dimension. On the second dimension, the firm changes its value creation by embedding operant resources into objects, by changing the integrators of resources, and by reconfiguring value constellations. Finally, we offer some managerial and research implications of this expanded and strategic view of discontinuous innovation.

To buy the article, click here and then click on the right side for pdf.

Citation: Michel, Stefan, Stephen W. Brown, and Andrew S. Gallan (2008), "An Expanded and Strategic View of Discontinuous Innovations: Deploying a Service-Dominant Logic," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36 (1), 54-66.

Reconfiguration of the conceptual landscape: a tribute to the service logic of Richard Normann

Stefan Michel, Stephen L. Vargo, and Robert F. Lusch

This article is a tribute to the late Richard Normann, whose call for a “service logic” (Normann, Reframing Business: When the Map Changes the Landscape, Wiley, Chichester, p. 99, 2001) both parallels and enriches service-dominant (S-D) logic (Vargo and Lusch, J. Mark, 68:1–17, 2004a). Like Vargo and Lusch, Normann shifted the focus of the offering from an output to a process of value creation and perceived the firm as an organizer of this process, with the customer as a co-producer, rather than a receiver of value. He also argued that offerings are “frozen knowledge,” similar to Vargo and Lusch’s contention that the basis of exchange is applied operant resources (service) and suggested that the ‘dematerialization’ of resources increases their ‘liquidity’, which allows increased “density” for value creation. Thus, he suggested that firms need to “reframe business”—rethink the logic of value creation—to reveal opportunities in reconfiguring the value constellations of which they are part. This tribute explores these and other similarities and differences between Normann’s work and the evolving S-D logic.

To buy the article, click here and then click on the right side for pdf.

The Upside of Falling Flat

Stefan Michel, Harvard Business Review, April 2007.

In the end, the decision by McDonald’s to build a couple of four-star European hotels, with arch-shaped headboards for the beds and fast-food restaurants on-site, wasn’t as bizarre as it seemed.

The Golden Arch venture in Switzerland ended in 2003 after two and a half years, when the pair of McDonald’s hotels closed. But as I tell my MBA students and executive-education participants, the foray can be thought of as an inexpensive “real option” that provided the innovation-hungry company with an opportunity to learn valuable lessons from a controlled failure.

To download this article for free, click here.

Mass Customization

Endnote Styles for Marketing Journals

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Deutsche Publikationen

Innovationen durch neue Wertkonstellationen

Die gegenwärtige Krise birgt zwei Gefahren für Innovationen im Unternehmen. Erstens werden Budgets und Ressourcen gekürzt für Projekte, die sich erst langfristig auszahlen, um Liquidität zu horten. Zweitens, und vielleicht nicht weniger gefährlich, werden Trends zuwenig beachtet, weil die ganze Aufmerksamkeit der Frage gilt, ob wir uns in einer V-Rezession befinden, oder in einer U-, W-, oder L-Rezession.

Einer dieser Trends ist die weiter zunehmende Nähe zwischen Wirtschaftspartner, die getrieben wird durch neue Kommunikationsmittel und –verhalten. E-Mail, Skype, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, eBay, Paypal, Fedex und IBAN-Banknummern machen das globale Dorf zur Realität und führen dazu, dass ein Unternehmen immer seltener als isolierte Wertkette funktioniert. Das Unternehmen und seine Mitarbeitenden sind in vielfältiger und sehr dynamischer Weise mit anderen Partnern verknüpft. Die globale, unternehmensübergreifende Arbeitsteilung ist dank tiefen Transaktionkosten möglich geworden.

Damit stellt sich die Frage, wie sich die Innovationen der Zukunft von den Innovationen der Vergangenheit unterscheiden, und welche Rolle dem Strategischen Marketing zukommt.

Link zum Artikel, der am 28.10.09 in der Handelszeitung erschien.

Die praktische Relevanz individualisierbarer Massengüter

von Michael Kreuzer, Richard Kühn und Stefan Michel (Die Betriebswirtschaft, Heft 4, 2007)

Die kundenindividuelle Massenfertigung wird unter Betonung der informations- und produktionstechnischen Möglichkeiten häufig als generell überlegene strategische Option empfohlen. Unbeachtet bleiben dabei nachfrageseitige Erfolgsvoraussetzungen. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird ein Modell vorgestellt, das Zusammenhänge zwischen kundenbezogenen Einflussfaktoren der Nachfrage nach individualisierbaren Produkten aufzeigt. Das Modell wird exemplarisch auf der Basis einer empirischen Untersuchung zum Markt für Freizeitkleider überprüft. Dem Praktiker bietet das Modell Ansatzpunkte, um das Potenzial von Mass Customization aus Nachfragesicht zu beurteilen.

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Pricing bei Dienstleistungen und Yield Management.
Grundlagen, Beispiele und Herausforderungen

von Stefan Michel und Corine Zellweger. Um den Artikel herunterzuladen, klicken Sie bitte hier.

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