Blog · Innovation signals
“Designed by our fans”: how user-designed disclosure signals innovation
More and more firms tell customers who designed their products, and highlight it when an offering is “fan-designed”. Research so far has mostly looked at what these disclosures do for the firm as a whole. In a new article in Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Richard Huaman-Ramirez, Aranzazu Gaztelumendi and I look at the product level: how does saying that fans designed a product change the way consumers see that product, and do they buy it?
What we did
We define a fan-designed disclosure as a public statement that assigns authorship of design decisions to fans. Building on signaling theory and heuristic processing, we ran three experiments to test whether, how and when such disclosures shape market responses.
What we found
User authorship signals innovation. Attributing the design to fans rather than to the company raises both perceived firm innovativeness and perceived product innovativeness. Perceived product innovativeness in turn drives purchase intention, a pathway not previously shown in the user-designed literature.
What matters is that users designed the product, not which kind of users.
“Fans” or “consumers” makes no difference. When credibility and process rigor are held constant, “designed by fans” and “designed by consumers” produce the same outcomes. User authorship itself is the operative cue, which challenges what lead-user research would predict.
The effect is stronger for technological products. In technological categories, product performance is harder to judge before purchase, so design cues become more diagnostic and the disclosure carries more weight.
Implications for managers
The study gives concrete guidance on what to say (disclose user authorship), how specific to be (a generic “designed by our users” works as well as “designed by our fans”, provided the process is credible) and where the message works best (technological categories).