Buyer behavior · Full-text qualitative longitudinal, multi-method customer-journey study
Access-based customer journeys
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science · 2023
Summary
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.
For your marketing
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.
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.
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.
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.
Research sources
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.