Imagine the following situation. You are browsing on the Internet, and suddenly you see the following product: a projection alarm clock which also projects the time on your wall. You think it is a very interesting and cool product, so you decide to buy the product. The next day, your package is delivered and you can enjoy the product. What is the likelihood that you are going to tell someone about this product? Probably very high, because the product is interesting and nice. However, do you think that you will still be talking about this projection alarm clock in two months? According to Berger and Schwartz (2011), you probably won’t.
How would you feel when you are browsing on the internet, and you suddenly see an advertisement with your name on it? Or, how would you feel when you see an advertisement with information about your previous transactions? You might think, on the one hand, that it is a good advertisement, because it is tailored to your needs. On the other hand, this might enhance feelings of intrusiveness as well. Well, this is the trade-off that is examined in the paper of van Doorn and Hoekstra (2013).
An industry in which you might not expect to see active consumer participation is the Toy Industry. However, there is a company which uses open innovation to gather new, original, and creative ideas, namely the LEGO Group. You might know LEGO from playing with it when you were a little kid, or from the pain you might have had if you once stepped on a LEGO brick.
As you might know, LEGO also has some adult fans. It is not a surprise that some adults still find LEGO amazing, because one can build whatever he or she wants. LEGO managers became more aware of innovations by these adult fans (Antorini et al., 2012). Therefore, the managers realized that some of these ideas could be interesting to the target market as well (Antorini et al., 2012). The LEGO Group also learned from a hacking experience that the engagement of fans could contribute to the coolness of the LEGO brand (Hatch and Schultz, 2010). This was the beginning of what is now called ‘LEGO Ideas’.
Consumer Value Creation 