After being turned down repeatedly for parts because she didn’t fit Hollywood’s image of what a female character should be, actress and prosumer Felicia Day created a practically no-budget web series (“The Guild”) about her own experiences as a geek. The series is now entering it’s 6th season, has reached a huge audience, and won countless awards while Day now runs a network of popular web shows.
If you gave me the opportunity to, I could gush to you forever about the papers I’ve written on the sociology of the internet –I get excited talking about the huge influence of online public spheres and the virality of social movements and attitude. But for brevity’s sake, I’ll limit my enthusiasm to one of my favourite concepts that is easily relatable to marketing: the Web 2.0 “prosumer”.
In short, we’re a long way into the era of “Web 2.0”, where web users no longer act simply as consumers of web content but producer-consumers (“prosumers”) that generate their own content for each other and with each other, including everything from blog posts and Facebook photos to web shows and software. Anyone could potentially reach a huge audience with their ideas, and the impact is awesome. If I want to watch a comedy about a bunch of socially awkward gamers and another internet user wants to produce that, it doesn’t matter that some network executive doesn’t think there’s a market for it on television; they can bring it to a web audience. A brilliant idea for a product doesn’t necessarily depend on the interest of venture capitalists anymore; thanks to crowd funding websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, innovators can go straight to interested consumers to finance their creations. The more power prosumers have to bring their ideas and content to a large audience, the less unnecessary filters there are on creativity and innovation.
And as I learn about marketing concepts in COMM 296, I constantly find myself considering the implications of prosumer-power on marketing practices and vice versa. How can marketers learn from famous prosumers (Felicia Day, Philip DeFranco, etc.) who have mastered viral marketing? How do prosumers, often with no marketing training, communicate their contents’ value as worth web users’ time? And how do marketers decide which prosumers to partner with to reach their target market?
I know I’m all-questions-no-answers on this, but I think it’s worth marketing students’ time to consider how marketing might change by the time we hit the field.
Please note: The “prosumers” that I’m referring to are not to be confused with the alternate definition of “professional-consumers”. When discussing content creation on the web, the term usually refers to “producer-consumers” rather than the aforementioned marketing segment.
Such an interesting topic! And your very last sentence is so insightful: things will be VERY different by the time you hit the field. The execution of marketing strategy is getting more and more creative and innovative all the time… Yet, I believe the fundamental principles will still be valid (e.g. the concept of delivering more value than your competitors, including competitors in different forms; the importance of understanding the target market; the need to continually improve and evolve the product and our methods of communicating with consumers of it; etc. etc. etc.). Heck, they haven’t changed in the 20 years since I first studied them! 🙂
I’m going to try to find a way to raise the topic of prosumers in the Product P module that we are starting tomorrow and continuing next week and the week after… but if I forget or fail to make a strong connection, would you consider raising your hand in class and asking about it or commenting on where it might fit, please?
Anyway, great first marketing post! Now let’s see another!
P.S. After we met and you had mentioned Kickstarter to me, I went and did some reading online. Had you seen this article, by any chance? http://betabeat.com/2012/10/kickstarter-addiction-is-apparently-a-thing-now/. Talk about “sociology of the internet”…
It’s good to know that the fundamental principles remain relevant, especially when it’s hard not to worry about how quickly things are always changing.
I have not seen that article, so thank you very much! Incidentally, the message boards they refer to in that article is on the community page for the one other company I would love to work for (Geek & Sundry). It’s interesting to watch how companies like Kickstarter react to issues with crowd-funding as they come up, considering it’s fairly uncharted territory (they just reworked their standards for pitching a project a couple of weeks ago in an attempt to prevent false advertising).
I’ll definitely try my best to bring the prosumer topic up!
(I apologize for the lack of a second post, it’s on its way by the end of the week)