Overcoming Mass Confusion: Collaborative Customer Co-Design in Online Communities

When acting as co-designers, customers face new uncertainties and risks, coined "mass confusion" in this article. Building on a construction strategy of empirical management research in the form of six case studies, we propose the use of online communities for collaborative customer co-design in order to reduce the mass confusion phenomenon. In so doing so, we challenge the assumption made by most mass customization researchers that offering customized products requires an individual (one-to-one) relationship between customer and supplier.