From Access to Ownership: Spillover Effects from Access-Based Services on Buying Behavior

Recently, we recognize changes in consumer behavior. Ownership gets less important and other consumption modes which do not involve a transfer of ownership gain in relevance. Services that provide access to a physical good for a short period of time constitute a business model innovation (Baumeister, Scherer, and Wangenheim 2015). We know several terms in this business context such as sharing (Belk 2010), collaborative consumption (Botsman & Rogers 2010) or nonownership services (Wittkowski, Moeller, and Wirtz 2013). Our study focuses on the concept of access-based services which are defined as “market-mediated transactions that provide customers with temporally limited access to goods in return for an access fee, while the legal ownership remains with the service provider” (Schaefers, Lawson, and Kukar-Kinney 2015). More and more manufacturing companies started to launch innovative business models based on this trend (e.g. Car2Go by Daimler or DriveNow by BMW).

Previous studies focused mainly on the antecedents of the use of access-based concepts (Bardhi & Eckhardt 2012; Lamberton & Rose 2012; Möhlmann 2015) or examined characteristics of ownership concepts that drive the use of access concepts (Schaefers et al. 2015). To the best of our knowledge, research on the relationship between access-based consumption and ownership-consumption is very limited. Thus, we do not know the consequences of these new business models for manufacturing companies and their major business of selling products. To gain a better understanding, this research project addresses the above mentioned research gaps.

The first aim of the research project is to investigate spillover effects by empirically examining the changes in consumer perception and attitudes after the use of a product in an access-based consumption context. We want to understand the relevance of access-based services in forming and modifying attitudes and beliefs towards products used in this nonownership concepts. Furthermore the aim of this project is to examine the role of access-based consumption in the adoption of new and innovative products. For this purpose, we draw on information integration theory as well as on the literature of innovation adoption and trial to develop a set of hypothesis that we will empirically test. In order to test the hypotheses we apply a longitudinal study. We will examine changes in the identified constructs after the brand respectively product experience in an access-based services setting. For this purpose, we will measure the constructs before and after the use. From a theoretical perspective, our research will contribute to research on the connection between nonownership and ownership consumption. From a practical perspective, we get knowledge how access-based service can be seen as a trial for new products. With that, we learn how manufacturing companies could use access-based services to promote new products and thus drive the diffusion of innovations.