Business- and Consumer-Initiated Prosumption and Its Effects

Frankfurt.
The next speakers here at Prosumer Revisited are Matthias Bode and Per Østergaard, whose interest is in consumption studies. How do consumers relate to culture, products and brands, companies, and each other - and where does the idea of the prosumer fit in here? They begin by noting the idea of integrating consumers into the production sphere in order to make production more democratic as well as to make production more profitable.

How can different conceptual approaches to the consumer be mapped? One approach is to map them across the micro-macro continuum. On the macro level, the term is used to refer to a kind of social revolution in late capitalism, but also to the potential for exploiting consumers by involving them in production processes; on the micro level, it is used more anecdotally to refer to examples and symptoms of such changes, but without enough broader conceptual support. From a marketing perspective, at the micro level there is interest in developing new revenue models and changing relationships between companies and customers, while at the macro level there is a focus on the co-creation of meaning.

What exactly are these processes of meaning co-creation? What kind of meaning is being created? Producers create products which embody certain meanings, of course, but consumers also change that meaning through their rituals of purchase and use. Prosumers can be inserted into this system as mediators between consumers and producers, then - adding their own meanings and communicating the outcomes of this meaning-making process to both sides.

What is necessary, then, is to distinguish between business- and consumer-initiated prosumption practices. Consumer-initiated processes lead to business adaptation, while business-initiated processes lead to consumer adaptation. Of course, in Toffler's time even processes initiated by individual consumers (direct international dialling instead of using an operator, for example, or self-service at the petrol station) could be considered as prosumption, of course, but we have moved on from there; today, what is becoming more important is the potential for direct interaction between consumers.

Where this is initiated by the company, however, there still remains a strong interest in owning and controlling the brand; where it is initiated by the consumer collective, however, the sense of brand ownership transfers to the community, and they begin to act as 'brand stewards' or even enhance products. Is prosumption, then, about adding use value, or about adding exchange value - when does prosumption add the one or the other? This needs to be further researched.

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