Increasing the consumer-perceived benefits of a mass-customization experience through sales-configurator capabilities

The consumer's experience of self-customizing a product with a sales configurator can be a source of experience-related benefits for the consumer, above and beyond the traditionally considered utility of possessing a product that better fits his/her idiosyncratic needs. Although such experience-related benefits have been found by previous studies as increasing consumers' willingness to pay for mass-customized products, research on what characteristics sales configurators should have to increase such benefits is still in its infancy. In this paper, we argue that two such benefits (i.e., hedonic and creative-achievement benefits) increase as a sales configurator deploys, to a greater extent, the following capabilities: focused navigation, flexible navigation, user-friendly product space description, easy comparison and benefit-cost communication. Subsequently, by analyzing 675 self-customization experiences made by 75 engineering students on 30 real Web-based configurators of consumer goods, we find empirical support for all the hypothesized relationships. We conclude discussing the contribution of the study to relevant debates, its managerial implications as well as its limitations and the related opportunities for further research. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.