When feedback dampens creativity

When feedback dampens creativity

Over the past decade, companies have begun using online ordering capabilities to develop a powerful marketing tool — “mass-customisation” systems that let customers design their own products.

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5 HOURS 16 MIN AGO

Over the past decade, companies have begun using online ordering capabilities to develop a powerful marketing tool — “mass-customisation” systems that let customers design their own products.For example, Nike, Lego, Threadless, Porsche and the Ford Motor Company all give consumers the ability to choose colours and other options.

Research shows that consumers value self-created products more than ready-made ones. Companies have recently started encouraging people to use social media to “share” prototypes of their self-designed products with friends before finalising their choices.

We conducted a study in collaboration with a large European automaker whose customers can specify features in 14 different categories, including lighting, interior decor and seating. We obtained data on 149 consumers who had designed a car and asked a social media friend for feedback before finalising the order and also studied 684 customers who had designed a car without getting any feedback.

We found that those who received feedback tended to modify their configurations in order to conform to it, with those whose initial designs reflected relatively extreme choices (unusual colours, for example) making the biggest modifications.

Overall, the cars designed by customers who received feedback were less distinctive than the cars designed by those who did not.

To better understand these field results, we conducted two experiments using an online jewellery-designing tool and a Web-based community platform we created. In the first experiment, we asked 1,092 women to design a pair of earrings, giving them feedback purportedly from another community member before they submitted a final design.

Their designs changed far more between the initial and final stages than those of a control group whose members got no feedback. And the women who received feedback were more likely to have trouble finalising the design — and less likely to be satisfied with the results.

In a follow-up experiment involving 46 women, we produced and gave them the earrings they had designed and called them three weeks later with an offer to buy the jewellery back.

We found that, on average, those who had received feedback had worn their earrings only a third as often as the other subjects had and were willing to sell them back for just 14 Swiss francs (S$19.60); members of the control group wanted 40 francs for theirs.

Social media sharing can play an important role in increasing brand awareness, but marketers should use caution when incorporating sharing features into mass-customisation programmes.

Feedback dampens creativity, reduces originality and diminishes customer satisfaction. © 2013 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Christian Hildebrand is a Project Leader, and Andreas Herrmann is Director at the Center for Customer Insight at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland. Gerald Haubl is a Professor at the University of Alberta and the University of St Gallen. Jan R Landwehr is a Professor at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.