Week Five: Communities, Collaboration and the Future
In his blog, marketing executive John Jantsch states, “A good brand is not simply a great logo, or a beautiful brochure, or a cool website. The essence of a good brand is a great customer experience (2009)”. A great example of a company with a great customer experience is Threadless, an online T-shirt store. The T-shirts are fashionable and well-made. But more importantly, the customer experience is memorable and enjoyable. Threadless is also an example of produsage production (a top-down meets bottom-up method of production).
An exciting cross over between virtual and physical projects is occurring due to new produsage business models. According to Bruns, produsage is being translated from the confinements of the informational, intangible, digital realm to the produsage of physical products. As Eric Von Hippel notes in his book Democratizing Innovation, the design phase of physical products is made up of an informational layer such as blue prints, images, text or software. Harnessing this realization, it is becoming increasingly common for industry to allow online communities to virtually design their products in this informational phase. In doing so, producers tap into the very wants and needs of their consumers and essentially are designing tailor-made products for their target markets.
There has been a significant shift from traditional industries to industries of Produsage, which has caused major changes to current business models. Produsage has allowed consumers to design and create their own work, and is known as open source software. This concept means that consumers can use designs from companies as a template for their own creations, and means that consumers are able to get exactly what they want in a product. This gives producers an advantage as it allows them to see what consumers want in a product and cater to their individual needs. A popular site that has used a similar model to this is Ebay, which allows users to buy and sell what they want and not have to worry about the traditional mediator in between. This model is successful it caters to the needs of every consumer, and is making good money because of this factor. It is saving money because it allows businesses to only sell what they know will be consumer, therefore there is no wasted money down the drain.
Many of these businesses have been created buy, make, and sell websites to cater for the needs of their consumers. An example of this is Ponoko.com which allows consumers to design the product they want, or alter another, then the manufactures at Ponoko will produce them for you, as well as deliver it for you. The site also provides helpful tips through their design software, where they help you to design your own products as well as giving you a reasonable price before producing it for you. Examples of other sites that use this model include spoonflower.com which allows consumer to customize fabrics, and emachineshop.com where consumers use similar strategies as Ponoko, except they design machinery items such as doorknobs and car parts.
To me, the concept of ‘produsage’ seems largely theoretical. In theory, it is undeniably beneficial to have consumers play a hand in the media that they consume. The possibility for expansion of a global knowledge is increased massively, proportionate to the scale of informed contributors. But what does all of this mean for society? HOW is this knowledge useful, if there is no application for it in the ‘real world.’ Bruns argues that this shared scope of knowledge can be of use in practical fields such as construction. A designer somewhere comes up with a model for a car or a bridge, and a mechanic or an engineer on the other side of the world puts it together. This takes away the costs of bringing the top professionals from their respective fields physically together, and allows for superior products to be assembled at a fraction of the price such a product would have previously cost. Again, in theory, this idea is fantastic. However, it proves to be pretty impractical.
Leave a Reply