It is Worth More When It is Shared: Exploring Values Related to Shared-Use New Products

Résumé 0

Recent research has shown that exchange value goes beyond utilitarian and functional aspects of goods or services. Value can be considered as symbolic, social or emotional. Postmodernism resurgence enhances significantly the appearance of new value categories. The growing importance of new behaviors shed a new light on a specific consumption way: shared consumption, i.e. simultaneous and coordinated consumption of the same product by more than one person. However, literature has brought mainly an individualistic response by identifying values for the sake of the individual consumer. Therefore, our research aims at investigating dimensions of value creation in case of innovative products linked to sharedusage. Three focus groups have been conducted. Subjects were asked to give their perceptions about three products concepts whit inherent shared-use characteristics. We ask them to imagine themselves in a real situation of concept use. Content analysis has revealed the categorization of news values, namely Synergy, Shared Expertise; Accuracy/Shared Contemplative Sensitivity, Conviviality, Integration/Domination, Reassurance, Tribalism and Communion. From a theoretical standpoint, this typology completes the individualistic Holbrookian model. Managerial contribution remains in the fact that this new typology can help R&D managers to explore shared-use values in new product development and use it in the different steps of new product elaboration.