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Many if not most new product or service offerings fail to achieve their hoped-for market acceptance or do so only after long and expensive trial and error. To improve these odds, some companies have begun working more directly with customers to “co-create” innovations. This raises the question: Who are the “best” consumers to engage in this way? Some look to “lead users,” others to especially “innovative” consumers.

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Hoffman, Donna L., Praveen Kopalle, and Thomas P. Novak, "The “Right” Consumers for Better Concepts: Identifying and Using Consumers High in Emergent Nature to Further Develop New Product Concepts" (June 9, 2009

While much research has emphasized improving current new product concept techniques, little work has focused on trait-based approaches that specify which consumers are the “right” ones to use in the new product development process, particularly in the consumer goods industry. We propose… Continue

White, Tiffany B., Thomas P. Novak and Donna L. Hoffman, “Evidence and Consequences of Egocentric Accounting Biases in Customer-Seller Relationships” (September 9, 2007).

We investigate egocentric biases in mental accounting within the context of information-driven consumer seller relationships. Our research suggests that consumers keep “loose mental accounts” of exchange benefits and costs that are balanced when resource exchanges are either contingent or temporally integrated (i.e., exchanged… Continue

Novak, Thomas P. and Donna L. Hoffman, “The Fit of Thinking Style and Situation: New Measures of Situation-Specific Experiential and Rational Cognition” (August 27, 2007).

Abstract: Decades of theoretical and empirical research in social and cognitive psychology provide strong evidence that consumers process information in two distinct and qualitatively different ways: rational and experiential. However, there has been surprisingly little research attention devoted to explicitly measurin… Continue