Revisiting form postponement at the operations-marketing interface: form postponement types, customer utility and sales performance

Research on form postponement finds that deferring product differentiation along a manufacturing and distribution process improves the efficiency of a manufacturer by reducing demand uncertainty and the related safety stock costs. The underlying assumption of this stream of research is that form postponement increases customer utility by ensuring the rapid delivery of many pre-specified product variants. However, we contend that form postponement can also foster customer utility by providing customers more time to articulate their needs or by sparing them the trouble of forecasting how their needs will change during the product’s lifespan. We hence propose that a manufacturer should implement different types of form postponement depending on its intended impact on customer utility. By doing so, we contribute to the literature on form postponement by acknowledging that its value is not restricted to the reduction of demand uncertainty and by showing how it should be used to link the operations and marketing strategies of a manufacturing firm.