"Consumer"
Paul Ford
on consumer culture:
The word "consumers" makes me sad for this world. Whenever someone tries to convince you of advertising's nobility, remember that word -- the industry looks at you and sees not a human, but a gobbling creature with money to spend.
To which
Kottke adds,
I can't recall where I heard this, but my favorite definition of a consumer is "a wallet with a mouth".
This is a holdover from a dying economy, an older (and condescending) set of relations between customers and organizations. As
the Cluetrain people put it, markets are conversations. Or, as Alvin Toffler put it several decades back, the new economy is moving from passive consumers (who are, as Kottke put it, thought of simple as mouths to receive goods in exchange for currency) to active "prosumers"--people are increasingly both producers and consumers. Markets, conversations, are mutual activities.
Take, for example, the possibilities involved in Apple's recent suite of offerings that includes
iTunes (and
iTunes Music Store) and
GarageBand. This array of technologies oscillates between consumer and producer.
To take this a step further, what happens if Apple begins looking at GarageBand users as producers of content for iTunes Store? What if they open up their licensing procedure to allow--encourage--people to upload songs they've written for sale? This might be a way for Apple to answer
criticism that iTunes Store is merely supporting existing big business in the music industry (which in some ways, is the root of the whole file-sharing issue: fans don't want to support the bloated excess.) iTunes Music Store reportedly operates at only a break-even point because 65 cents of every 99 cent purchase goes directly to the major labels.
It might be a stretch to think this prosumer/conversation economy is feasible--will individual users be able to produce saleable content? Stranger things have happened. Amazon.com, for example, started in a garage in Bellevue, managed to weather the dot.com crash and emerged as an ecommerce leader--partially due to its ability to construct customer relations as conversations rather than simple, one-time sales. Amazon attempts to learn about customers and provide custom recommendations; it supports exhange of information among customers; it provides spaces for customers to add to the site, in the form of reviews.
[via
kottke.org]
Posted by johndan at February 25, 2004 07:25 PM
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