Customer behavior and adoption · Full-text qualitative longitudinal, multi-method customer-journey study
Access-based customer journeys
Lez Trujillo-Torres, Eda Anlamlier, Laetitia Mimoun, Lagnajita Chatterjee, Delphine Dion (2023). Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.
Plain-English take
Access-based journeys are systemic, tightly coupled and vulnerable to circularity failures; customers act as prosumers and bypass, stretch or hack platform policies to personalize journeys. Job crafting can create individual value and collective problems, but can also reveal innovations that platforms may formalize. Managers therefore need agility and monitoring rather than assuming a fully controllable linear journey. For a founder, use this as a question to test in your own context, not a universal playbook.
How much weight to give this
3.5/5 Useful evidence with meaningful caveats
The 1–5 evidence-check score is a practical reading aid, not a formal peer review or a probability that a conclusion is true. It combines design strength (2 points), sample reporting (1), comparison/control clarity (1), and how much of the paper could be checked (1). Access affects how confidently this directory can assess a study, not the study's underlying quality. Blinding is reported separately because it is not relevant to every design.
The described design supports the question, but it does not establish causal effects beyond the reported setting.
The reviewed source reports a sample or corpus size (34,); size alone does not establish representativeness.
The source reports a comparison; check the original methods for its construction.
Firecrawl retrieved a full paper or full-text publisher page for this annotation.
Double-blind? Blinding was not established from the captured source; it may not apply to this study design.
Research question
What the authors investigated
How do customers shape access-based platform journeys through prosumption/job crafting, and what are the implications for managing digital platform journeys?
Design
Longitudinal multi-method case study of Rent the Runway: customer and blogger interviews, social-media posts, marketing materials and news articles. Analysis uses staged qualitative coding to identify journey dynamics, job-crafting practices and collective outcomes.
Sample and setting
US access-based fashion-rental platform Rent the Runway. Interview participants were all women, average age 34, recruited through convenience/snowball sampling; most had Unlimited memberships. The study also analyzes bloggers and platform/marketplace documentary and social-media material; the publisher/open paper should be consulted for the complete corpus details.
Reported result
What the study found
Access-based journeys are systemic, tightly coupled and vulnerable to circularity failures; customers act as prosumers and bypass, stretch or hack platform policies to personalize journeys. Job crafting can create individual value and collective problems, but can also reveal innovations that platforms may formalize. Managers therefore need agility and monitoring rather than assuming a fully controllable linear journey.
This is a paraphrase of the source. Check the original paper for definitions, estimates, statistical uncertainty and analysis details.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
The authors stress that the qualitative findings are a starting point with limited generalizability/refutability, focus on highly intermediated/low-consociality platforms, and call for research across other intermediation levels, customer-to-customer supply chains and non-platform contexts.
Possible founder application
Treat this as evidence for the specific customer behavior and adoption question studied. Compare the setting and sample to your company before changing a growth decision; use a local experiment where the paper does not match your context.
Evidence access
Full text retrieved from publisher or linked open repository
PMC provides the publisher-linked full text with DOI, abstract, method, participant setting, findings and limitations; the authors' City Research Online page independently exposes the accepted/open paper and exact bibliographic record. Correction notices were not separately verified in this collection; consult the current publisher record before applying the findings.
If only an abstract or metadata was available, the profile is limited to claims supported there. A paper's paywall does not change its evidentiary status, but it limits what we can substantiate from accessible text.