Testing the moderating effects of toolkits and user communities in personalization: The case of social networking service

a r t i c l e i n f o Firms are increasingly seen to provide customization tools for customers to personalize products and service tailored to the customers' specific needs. How to attract and empower customers into the personalization process and how to improve the effectiveness of personalization are important for firms. The current study examines the moderating effects of two popular enabling approaches implemented by firms, customization toolkits and user communities, on the relationship between the effectiveness of personalization and two innovative customer characteristics, of leading edge status and user knowledge. Using data collected from 308 Chinese customers who participate in the personalization of social networking service, we found that toolkits had a marginal but positive moderating effect, and user communities had no significant moderating effect on the relationship between leading edge status and personalization effectiveness. However, both toolkits and user communities had significant and positive moderating effects on the relationship between user knowledge and personalization effectiveness. The implications of the findings for research and practice are discussed. The implementation of internet technologies, especially web 2.0, in customer-firm interactions has changed the roles played by customers in a firm's production and innovation process [41,67]. Customers are increasingly seen as a firm's co-producers and co-creators of products and services [25,44,46,54,67]. Firms usually provide tools for customers to customize and personalize individualized products and services in order to meet customers' specific needs [57,58]. Previous studies have reported various practices of co-creation and co-design between customers and firms, as well as personalization and self-design by customers , such as snowboarding, mountain-biking, kite surfing, Apache software, scientific instruments, library systems, and petroleum pro-How to design and improve the co-creation and personalization process is important for both practitioners and researchers. Previous studies have found that co-creation and personalization are more likely to emerge among knowledgeable users who have the domain knowledge about the products and services to be used or consumed [32,51], as well as among lead users whose needs are not satisfied by the default products and services but expect to benefit from developing some solutions to change the products and services [15,39,40,49,53,56]. Lead users can be measured by leading edge status (LES), which refers to the degree to which a user exhibits lead user characteristics in terms of exploring new ways to solve problems and expecting benefits of new products ahead of other users [40]. Other studies have revealed that …