A matter of time: Phases of customer co-creation community participation and their impact on customer behavior

Despite the growing relevance of co-creating customer communities only little scientific evidence is available on their impact on transactional behavior of participants. Previous research has mostly used self-reported data or distinguished only between during and pre-community phases obtaining mixed results. However, the author proposes that co-creating community activity takes place in five distinguishable phases and changes in transactional behavior are limited to certain phases. Using 33 months of transactional data of a Dutch online auction provider a study was conducted covering all five phases of the community co-creation process from community planning over community set-up, co-development and co-testing to post-launch. The overall results indicate mixed effects of community participation on the different transactional variables during the co-creation process. Community participation had positive effects on auctions listing behavior at the community set-up, co-development and post-launch phases, whereby the number of auctions listed peaked during the community set-up phase. These results suggest that the impact on transactional behavior differs between co-creation phases and different psychological mechanism limited to certain phases might trigger the respective changes.

Continuous improvement logidtics project: A study on the increase of the finished goods warehouse of Unilever at Sta. Iria

This project is called Improvement Logistics Project and aims to study an opportunity of expansion of the output in 80% of the Unilever warehouse at Sta. Iria via an increase in exportations for the next two years. This has been done using the Distibuidora Luís Simões tariff rates as basis of comparison for the as-is and to-be situations. For this matter, an allocation of all the costs of the warehouse is prepared and described with the goal of comparing the differences with and without expansion. The results show that a better outcome is achieved with the investment, but the warehouse is yet to prove its efficiency against the distribution company.