When participating in a community, users often faced (1) burden of choice of finding the right option from a large number of customization options; (2) the difficulty of addressing individual needs and of transferring them into a concrete product specification; and (3) uncertainties (based on missing information) about the behavior of the product. These problems were named as "mass confusion." To solve the confusion, the author emphasized that traditional mass customization for transaction is not an appropriate way but the collaborate customer co-design would work.
In contrast, the community for collaborative customer co-design is different. It brings (1) a better starting configuration to users, (2) the fostering joint creativity and problem solving, and (3) the building of trust and the reduction of the perception of risk (p. 13). In this community, all customers can be members of the community instead of just some lead users as in the case of innovation community; and it often fosters aesthetic creativity instead of the joint solving of technical problems (p. 12). "Customization with regard to aesthetic design is often influenced by peers and the taste of a group rather than by the individual taste of a single person" (ibid).Of course, to solve the same confusion, the community for transaction, as a business community, could be improved by developing appropriate toolkits for cus
tomer co-design and building strong customization brands. However, this is the network between users and their suppliers, where the users often have less motivation to participate.
Compared with each other:
First, often, firms just offer a standard product as pre-configuration. Instead of focusing on automatic filtering processes in which a single customer does not get in contact with other customers, the community setting for customer co-design empowers an individual design process by sharing knowledge, providing a better fitting pre-configuration. Hence, within the community "affinity groups (Peppers & Rogers, 1997)" were formed and customers would receive recommendations for future purchases without the need to look at a broad range of products (pp. 14-15).
Second, communities for co-design reflect expert knowledge of customer groups with interact not only with one company, but importantly also with each other. This can
foster creativity and stimulate better solutions due to the effect of intrinsic motivation on innovation-related activities (self reward and exchange of information).
Third, a customized solution that is jointly developed by a group of users is often more robust. Communities where users can interact with each other can help in generating trusted recommendations. Communities of co-design could further enhance trust building and reduce the perceived risk of (potential) buyers of a customized product by building word-of-mouth communication.
"Customers participated in the community because they can directly benefit from a customized product variant, but also due to factors of intrinsic motivation as well as the peer recognition and reputation. [...] From a customer perspective, contributing to an anonymous information pool via the toolkit would remain a simple customer-supplier-interaction, most certainly lacking users' motivation" (p. 19).
All in all, form the mass customization, the customers could get the returns - (1) the value of a customized product and (2) rewards from the design process such as flow experience; but had to incur the costs - (1) the premium paid for the individualized product compared to a standard offering and (2) the drawbacks of the customers' active participation in value creation during the configuration process.
To analyze the above ideas, authors made use of Adidas and Lego as descriptive research, and utilized the cases of My Virtual Model, Usertool, American Eagle, and Swatch Via Della Spiga, as exploratory.
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