Building digital incentives for digital customer orientation in platform ecosystems

Abstract

How does customer orientation turn to digital customer orientation in the platform ecosystem? To this end, in this qualitative study, we tracked four Chinese companies to explain this shift and examined the role of digital incentives in the transition. Our findings reveal two distinct patterns of digital customer orientation, namely digital customer orientation complement and refinement, a difference that is essentially triggered by differences in the establishment time of focal firms in the platform ecosystem. The study also disentangles the dynamic process of shifting from traditional customer orientation to digital customer orientation in platform ecosystems and shows that digital incentives - incentive orchestration, incentive decentralization, and digital facilitation - can be instrumental in accelerating this process. Important management implications suggest that different digital customer orientation patterns are choices that companies make based on the environment, which need to be jointly embraced by the participants in the platform ecosystem.