One year ago I heard for the first time the word: Prosumer. The word prosumer is an acronym composed by the genuine fusion of PRODUCER and CONSUMER.
In 1972, Mashall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt suggested, in their book Take Today, that having new technologies people could be producer and consumer at the same time. In the same way, Alvin Toffler in 1980 coined the word prosumer, when he foresaw high saturated markets of standardized products, believing that companies could start a “mass customization” age getting customers involved in the design and production process.
However, currently mass customization is not as usual as Alvin forecasted. Most of consumption habits are passive, because consumers are not interested in making efforts to customize the large quantity of products and services they usually buy. As Barry Schwartz pointed out in The Paradox of Choice: Why More or Less, people experiment decreasing performance when buying, as a result of confusion generated by having excessive options that cause dissatisfaction and stress. By the way, a new segment is appearing: Amateurs highly committed; people that can consume products but at the same time build and share specific contents, information, channels and other networks to criticize or praise companies, products or services.
As we discussed in class, there is a correlation between our emotional state and what Barry Schwartz calls “tyranny of choice”. From unmet expectations to regret because of choosing the wrong way, that’s the peril of living in a multiple-choice society. Every time we have to buy a product there is a wide variety and assortment of products that difficult our choice causing stress.
Prosumers are assuming a role in this society that will become a key success factor for companies. A prosumer is a person connected to a large number of companies and with the capacity to publish opinions about them. Anciently a company could sell horrible products or deliver bad services, but nothing special happened. Nowadays, consumers have speakers everywhere, everything is happening simultaneously and this is extremely dangerous for companies that are not performing perfectly.
What is more interesting about this fact is that when a consumer has a wide range of products to choose from he/she usually enters the Internet and looks for information in communities, websites, blogs, etc. Indeed, a satisfied or dissatisfied consumer is able to spread all his/her knowledge about a product or service, allowing other consumers to reduce uncertainty during the consumer decision making. It means consumers are currently favoring or damaging brands image.
Related to what Barry Schwartz pointed out during his podcast, reducing uncertainty allows people to be more satisfied when buying a product, and also reduces stress. The consumer behavior will change into a more standardized process when buying low involvement products and into an easier process (because of having more information) when buying High involvement products. I would like to stress that having a large amount of information flowing on the Internet would force companies to provide excellent services and products to avoid criticism.
The society of Information will allow us to become more experts in consumer decision making processes, avoiding high levels of dissatisfaction as we currently experience. The report about happiness in America determined that Americans are also unhappier than ever before might simply be a perverse coincidence. We may even question the statistics: As the social stigma associated with depression decreases, people may be more open about their listlessness. They may even feel encouraged to consider themselves depressed as the subject receives so much attention in the media.
Every single person should try to write down, discuss and share its experiences, because collaboration creates communities allowing people to increase product knowledge and performance, and furthermore to adjust almost perfectly expectations and reality.
Finally, I would like to recommend this video that shows how media will impact in our society, changing habits, behavior and ways of thinking.
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