Creative Consumers: What’s your stance?

The following is an excerpt from Ian McCarthy’s blog entitled It Depends:

A few years back I wrote a paper with colleagues (Pierre Berthon, Leyland Pitt and Stephen Kates) on the phenomenon of creative consumers. These are individuals, or communities of individuals, who adapt or modify a proprietary product offering. They tinker and experiment with almost any product, ranging from automobiles to cell phones.

Traditionally, companies have disliked consumers messing with their products. They have got annoyed when the product is modified and used in a way in which it was not necessarily designed e.g., networking several Sony PlayStation 3 consoles to make a super computer. They can also get irritated when consumers alter their products and use them in regions of the world where they are not yet available, e.g., when iPhones were first released in the US they were hacked to work in Canada where they were not yet released. And firms get really angry when consumers modify products, such as the Xbox, to use pirated content. Consequently, many companies have tended to view creative consumers as threats to their business revenues and damaging to the reputation of their product brands.

To read more about Creative Consumers, visit Ian McCarthy’s blog It Depends.