Prosumers

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Prosumers = Consumers that are also Producers

refers to the breaking down of the barriers between production and consumption.


Description

Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva:

"Most of the concepts for Internet-based innovation are based on or draw from the concept of active customers that are at the same time producers. i.e. prosumers. The vision to involve customers in the production process has a long tradition and goes back to Alvin Toffler (cited in Klein & Totz 2004), who introduced the idea to involve consumers as co-producers, i.e. prosumers, into the value chains of companies in 1972. Under the pressure of increasing price competition in the 90s, and enabled by the Internet, companies started to involve customer through digitalized processes to voluntarily take over part of the value generation. A well known example are banks, which based on e-banking involved the customers in services such as cash collection through automated teller machines, self-processing of payments and similar." (http://berlinsymposium.org/sites/berlinsymposium.org/files/crowdsourcingenabledinnovation.pdf)


Discussion

Citation on The New Prosumers and their peer power:

"Customers have changed and adapted to this modern, continuously connected, media-fragmented world. They seek value by searching for themselves, and are not waiting for you to interrupt them with unwanted messaging. They look to their peers for voices of authority. They are in effect doing it for themselves. Some companies are responding to consumer power simply by focusing more energy through traditional marketing channels. But one can no longer take a one-way broadcast or a monopoly approach in a consumer-empowered world, because the internet, and increasingly the mobile phone, has fundamentally changed this. The harsh reality for all businesses today is that they need to change the way they think about marketing and marketing communication strategies. And the notion of mass media is fast becoming an oxymoron.

(Alan Moore, Market Leader, Autumn 2005, cited in Communities Dominate Brands Blog)

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