This article explores how firms can foster positive consumer inferences by communicating their new product development (NPD) openness. In particular, it analyzes inferences about a firm’s customer orientation, ability to develop high-quality products and innovativeness. Previous research has focused on examining inferences derived from cues about consumer contributions to the external design of products. This article extends current knowledge (i) by analyzing inferential processes when customer participation goes beyond external product design and affects functionality and (ii) by considering other forms of openness, namely expert contributions to NPD. The results of two experiments show that, in general, customer participation in NPD effectively triggers customer orientation inferences, while expert participation leads to inferences about a firm’s ability to develop high-quality products only in specific settings. Finally, counter to previous research, communicating external participation does not seem to be an effective cue to infer innovativeness for functional product contributions.

本文探讨了公司如何通过传达其新产品开发 (NPD) 的开放性来培养积极的消费者推理。特别是，它分析了关于公司的客户导向、开发高质量产品的能力和创新性的推论。先前的研究侧重于检查从消费者对产品外部设计贡献的线索得出的推论。本文扩展了当前知识 (i) 当客户参与超出外部产品设计并影响功能时的推理过程，以及 (ii) 考虑其他形式的开放性，即专家对 NPD 的贡献。两个实验的结果表明，一般来说，客户参与 NPD 有效地触发了客户导向推理，而专家的参与会导致对公司仅在特定环境中开发高质量产品的能力的推断。最后，与之前的研究相反，交流外部参与似乎并不是推断功能性产品贡献的创新性的有效线索。