No abstract

Purpose -Seeks to study the effect of a low-price guarantee (PG) on store price image and store patronage intention. Two kinds of low-price guarantee are studied: a price-matching guarantee (PMG) where the price difference is refunded and a price-beating guarantee (PBG) where a retailer offers an additional compensation. Design/methodology/approach -A questionnaire is used to collect information on 180 non-student respondents in an experimental framework where low-price guarantee dimension is manipulated through three advertisements for printers. Findings -Findings are: first, that PG indeed lowers store price image, increases the confidence that the store has lower prices and increases patronage intention; second, that, compared with a PMG whose effects are positive but rather small, a PBG further lowers the store price image on the low prices dimension without increasing the intention to search for lower price, this intention being already rather high in the PMG condition; third, that a larger effect is observed for non-regular customers.Research limitations/implications -Research limitations are associated with the data collection. For greater reality the study uses an existing retail chain, so specific effects coming from this chain could influence the results but this bias cannot be evaluated as the experiment involves one retailer only. Practical implications -Practical implications are that price image can be manipulated without any change in pricing policy by a low-price guarantee and that the interest to adopt a price-beating guarantee is real. Originality/value -The contribution of this study lies in its focus on a large PBG level that retailers already apply and in demonstrating that a PG depends on the relationship between the consumer and the retailer with a stronger effect on non-regular customers.

Co-innover avec les clients : entre intérêt et réticence pour les entreprises grand public Résumé : La co-innovation, ou appel à la créativité des clients au cours du processus de développement de produits/services, suscite un fort engouement tant parmi les professionnels que les académiques. Cet article se focalise sur la vision de cette pratique de la part d'entreprises grand public, qui perçoivent dans sa mise en oeuvre autant de bénéfices-acceptabilité commerciale, stimulation de la créativité et gestion de la relation client-que de freins potentiels-incompétence des clients, coût de la démarche et absence de contrôle. Enfin, il conclut sur une liste de recommandations à prendre en compte dans la perspective d'une application de la démarche, en termes de participants à solliciter à chaque phase du processus mais aussi de précautions à prendre et d'indicateurs d'efficacité à considérer.

The large potential of lead users (LUs) in developing innovative and radically new product concepts is well established in the literature. However, in a widely acknowledged study, Hoffman et al. introduced the new concept of emergent‐nature consumers (ENCs) and showed the superiority of this group of individuals over LUs in developing new product concepts. Consequently, they postulated ENCs to be “the right consumers” to be integrated in new product development processes. In this article, we critically reflect and build on Hoffman et al.'s study and further investigate the promise of the ENC concept as compared to the LU concept. In a pilot study, we replicated the study by Hoffman and colleagues: We conducted a crowdsourcing competition and asked for concepts for new services; those concepts had been generated collectively by the participants and had been assessed by a consumer crowd. In the main study, the participants of a crowdsourcing competition submitted individually generated concepts for products, which were evaluated by industry experts. Across both studies, using different empirical methods in two different contexts, and in contrast to Hoffman et al.'s work, we find support for LUs outperforming ENCs (as well as average users) in generating the commercially most promising concepts. Thus, our insights reinforce the existing user innovation literature and the notion of LUs being the primary source of new product/service concepts.