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EDITORIAL

Prosumers...

Dr.Roopa Vajpeyi
Hony.Editor

The word ''prosumer" was first coined and used by the futurist Alvin Toffler in 1979 in his book titled The Third Wave, to connote a blend of "producer" and "consumer". It referred to an individual consumer who would also be involved in designing the things s/he purchased. Increasingly, however the term has come to refer to a segment of users midway between consumers and professionals.

Earlier Horace Mann, in 1848, in his On Education and National Welfarewrote that "political economy which ... leaves out of account the elements of a wide-spread mental development is naught but stupendous folly. The greatest of

all the arts in political economy is to change a consumer into a producer."Eric Von Hippel in his book Democratizing Innovation, argues that with the ever-increasing ease of innovation due to the internet it “is becoming progressively easier for many users to get precisely what they want by designing it for themselves". The users who innovate first, hacking a product to meet their needs, are the 'lead users'. It is these 'lead users' who are Hippel's prosumers. For example writing a free operating system, or even publishing a free encyclopaedia may have seemed quixotic or delusional just a few years ago, but currently these form part and parcel of consumer lives. As one Prosumer has said "We can live a life more authored by our own will and imagination than by the material and social conditions in which we find ourselves." Clearly the Internet has hastened this and blogging, where direct quotation and linking is accepted as a legitimate part of the creative process, is here to stay. Blogging is also a tool in the hands of this "do-ityourself" brigade. Consumers are increasingly realising that they do not need to rely on traditional mainstream channels to inform, educate, and entertain, because they can actually do it themselves, just as traditional communities did. Earlier connectivity was limited, as were the means of communication. Now consumers can reach out to an ever-widening fraternity and devise ways and means of hitching themselves out of the mess created around them by the profiteers. Derrick de Kerckhove has called this "mass customisation", where to continue growing profit, businesses would initiate a process of mass customisation, that is, the mass production of highly customised products. The personal pronouns are signalling new trends in branding products with 'I, Me, Mine or Myself' appearing in many new avatarsof older brands and turning the focus on a personalised spin for individual consumers. The 'I' is emerging as mnemonic for all things young, or cutting-edge digital. My Pepsi can, i-pill, Apple with its signature 'I' campaign of beyond the iPod and iPhone with a new iPod family of iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle, and the latest iPod Classic are following each other in quick succession. Coca-Cola is advertising its 'My Coke Rewards' for loyal consumers. But this is just the market adding gloss to the customisation dimension in the product market. It actually does nothing for the consumer. Toffler has extended these and many other ideas well into the 21st-century. Along with recently published works such as Revolutionary Wealth (2006), we can recognise and assess both the concept and fact of the prosumer as it is seen and felt on a worldwide scale. Don Tapscott more fully elaborated on the concept in his 1995 book The Digital Economy calling it "Prosumption." More recently, The Cluetrain Manifesto noted that "markets are conversations" with the new economy moving from passive consumers ... to active prosumers. For instance, Amazon.com emerged as an ecommerce leader-partially due to its ability to construct customer relations as 'conversations' rather than simple, one-time sales. Amazon supports exchange of information among customers; it provides spaces for customers to add to the site, in the form of reviews. However, mass customisation has not taken place in most areas of the economy. Most consumption continues to be passive as critics of television and fast food would argue. Indeed, people are generally uninterested in going to the effort of customising the myriad products that comprise modern consumer culture. But as customers continue to demand more of their supplier relationships, Prosumer influence will increase and more producers will work in response to the pressure of consumer demands. We need to go back to becoming prosumers or rather pro-active consumers this festival season, paying more heed to environmental, social and company issues in our prosumption so that contemporaneity can coexist with tradition to bring maximum satisfaction to consumers. For us Indians it is the easiest thing, as we continue to cook and celebrate at home rather than support market practices, out to empty consumer coffers, specially during the festivals. Enjoy Divali and celebrate the waning of heat and the first welcome feel of cool mornings and pleasant evenings. May the year ahead be lighted up with promise of better times to come.

Dr.Roopa Vajpeyi, Hony.Editor

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