Rise of Prosumers
Enabling New Forms of Consumer Behaviour
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The rise of creator economy has three main dimensions- leveraging on fan following for distribution, content curation by crowd sourcing and re-intermediation
Some of the passion economy proponents have been inspirational in bringing innovative products and services with scale and speed. These created led brands have scaled much faster than other similar brands. They are mostly driven by purpose and aim to solve one critical customer need leading to sustainable and standalone businesses. They are able to solve the distribution problem through an extraordinary fan connect who would support the creators because of their affinity with the cause or creator themselves. This obviously has clear advantage in being able to pull through initial period of product launch which at times might give a false sense of product-market fit. It may turn out to be problematic if the creator looses faith of her fans. We have seen many creator led brands falling sideways after initial blockbuster opening because creator fades away or even worse gets cancelled. This initial success can also hide the inherent flaws in the product because a loyal fan would not give true feedback thus hiding a product flaws leading to major problems later in life cycle.
This initial success can also hide the inherent flaws in the product because a loyal fan would not give true feedback thus hiding a product flaws leading to major problems later in life cycle.
Community content curation is another development in passion economy that is transforming content consumption. Both YouTube and FaceBook have launched initiatives/products which have taken the lead from TikTok and Substack respectively. Youtube’s “Shorts” is a play on TikTok with similar formats and user experience. This could be very important for brands to create engagement with younger audience. Just the fact that India was first market for “Shorts”, right around the time when TikTok was banned tells us the importance of community driven content creation and curation. Facebook has finally entered the newsletter space and would be tying it up with FaceBook groups both private and public. This would be huge leg up for Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of taking FB away from being a public square to a more intimate private gathering of friends and family. Community content curation may also solve the quality control conundrum for platforms. As platforms grow, they attract new supply which tend to be of inferior quality but platforms must quickly establish the content curation ecosystem to discourage or even deleting undesirable behaviour while encouraging reliable desirable behaviour. Perhaps they might want to start with manual intervention but true trust may only be possible through automation driven through socially managed feedback ecosystem.
Creator economy has led to disintermediation of the traditional channels. There has been a trend where the use of assets has been delinked from ownership. Companies like AirBnB , Uber etc have demonstrated that true transformation would come from delinking physical asset ownership from its value creation process. This also means that the producers and consumers are getting connected through new intermediaries thereby creating re-intermediation. Instead of spending money on traditional distribution and financing channels, creator-led direct-to-consumer brands are spending tremendous resources on social media and advertising platform companies like Facebook and Google. In fact, many book publishers are now riding on the success of #BookTok to get these young TikTok creators to promote their books. They are very effective in using emotions mostly sad to create engagement with their fans.
The future of creator-led brands would be determined by their leverage over fans, community content curation on scale and of course using the new intermediaries to create a new prosumer class.
OTW
Over the Weekend, I was interacting with the organising team of NotOnMap Chamba Marathon. Good folks of Chamba District Administration and NOM are planning for an exciting event on 9th May 2021. Do let me know if you would like to participate, volunteer or help in any other manner. You can register for the event at ifinish using the link and find more information at the NotOnMap website.
During my short visit to Chamba, Himachal Pradesh which has been in planning for close to 22 years now, I met very interesting people who have been really inspirational in their own communities. Just before I left , I met two cyclist from Chamba Cyclist Association who were kind enough to render the folk version of my latest favourite song.
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Shailendra
I'm loving the growth in influencer marketing and content curating. The fact that social media platforms like FB & YouTube are now encouraging short videos content in their platform is a good example of how we are evolving in marketing. People now understand that their favourite actor does not use the thanda navratan oil or dermi cool themselves and that is when an influencer or a content creator is trustworthy cause they can be seen wearing or applying the products and clothes themselves.
This is the first time that I have got to know about 'Prosumers' and 'Prosumerism', so thank you so much sir for giving us the insights of the same. What surely can be said about this rising trend is that it is an amalgamation of producers and consumers. One of the best suited examples of this could be the 'Do-It-Yourself' customizations that a customer does to satisfy his/her varied demands.