Make it Your Own: How Process Valence and SelfConstrual Affect Evaluation of SelfMade Products

Self-production, participation of consumers in the production process of products for their own consumption, leads to consumers’ enhanced evaluations of the self-made products. Three experimental studies investigate how and why self-production affects consumers’ product evaluations and reveal that not all production experiences create additional value for all consumers. In particular, Studies 1 and 2, using hypothetical stories and real experiences, show that only positive (vs. negative) production experiences enhance evaluations of self-made products over products made by others. Positive (but not negative) experiences decrease the psychological distance between the self and the product and strengthen identification with it. Study 3 manipulates self-construal (independent vs. interdependent) to investigate its role on evaluation of self-made products and products made with close others as a group (i.e., group-made). Consumers with independent self-construal evaluate self-made (vs. other-made) products more favorably only if the process is positive. However, consumers with interdependent self-construal evaluate self-made products more favorably even if the process is negative. Additionally, consumers with interdependent (vs. independent) self-construal exhibit more favorable evaluation of group-made products. Finally, even if consumers know how another person feels while making a product, other people’s process emotions do not affect consumers’ product judgments as strongly as their own experienced process emotions. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Modern technology and production methods have enabled consumers to be more involved in the production process of products that they consume (Bendapudi & Leone, 2003; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004). Increasingly, companies such as Home Depot, Build-a-Bear, and IKEA encourage consumers to take part in the production process. In addition, manyWeb sites (e.g., CafePress.com, LapJacks.com, YouBars.com) provide tools for consumers who want to make and purchase selfmade products—products that consumers participate in creating. The range of products that consumers may play a part in creating is extensive. For example, consumers can make designs and place them on anything frommugs to tiles, and from t-shirts to cell phone skins. Being involved in the creation of a product may generate additional value for consumers and add to quality of life (Xie, Bagozzi, & Troye, 2008). Experiential (rather than material) products, such as concerts or vacations, have been shown to make individuals happier (Van Boven & Gilovich, 2003). In addition, investing time rather than money enhances the emotional significance of an event (Mogilner & Aaker, 2009). Making a product oneself rather than simply buying a finished product, by definition, combines experiential and material aspects of products, and requires an investment of time. Therefore, a consumer’s participation in the production process may contribute to happiness and emotional satisfaction derived from consumption behavior, over and above the value placed on the physical product itself. However, there has been limited theoretical speculation and few empirical studies that have focused on self-production, that is, consumers’ participation in the production process of products that they consume. The consumer behavior literature has tended to focus on what consumers purchase, an outcome, rather than what they do, a process, in relation to the product (Xie, Bagozzi, & Troye, 2008). A number of prior studies in service-dominant logic and cocreation literatures have examined how the integration of consumers into the decision-making mechanisms of a company affects consumer demand (Etgar, 2008; Vargo & Lusch, 2004), the ownership of the company’s products (Fuchs, Prandelli, & Schreier, 2010), and company attitudes (Fuchs & Schreier, 2011). The Psychology and Marketing, Vol. 31(6): 451–468 (June 2014) View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/mar © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/mar.20707