FROM CUSTOMER CHOICE TO ENTERPRISE COUNTERMEASURE: A FIELD THEORY PERSPECTIVE

How the customers making choice is a critical problem to be concerned by the different scholars and practitioners. Although there are a large amount of achievements in existing literatures from various research fields, this article offer a totally new perspective to describe the customer choice process based on classical field theory. It is argued that every customer has the corresponding potential in the static field constructed by the products and the customer will choose the product which can create the maximal potential. Moreover, the choice of the customer is not constant. It will vary with the change of product attractiveness. Therefore, the enterprises increasingly provide customized products in order to capture more customers effectively. Due to limited customized capacity, the enterprises have to cope with the problem how to adjust the positioning of brand or the flexibility of production with limited adjusting. budgets. A conditional optimization model is established to solve this problem. All the results show that field theory can be very helpful to quantify many qualitative issues in the process of customer choice and enterprise decision.