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Co-Creation or Exploitation Co-creation demonstrates a political kind of power that is aimed at generating certain forms of consumerlife. Whoever sees to it that a customer is in charge, generates so much money. In this case, the current business buzz urges marketing managers to make use of customers by putting them to work and as means of competence. Value of co-creation and service dominant logic of marketing (Prahalad, 2002), are two labels that contain the central idea of controlling over markets. Consumers can be attained best through provision of dynamic and managed consumer practice platform; whereby on one hand, there is consumer expertise and free creativity, on the other hand the ways that the consumer activities are desirable by marketers. Co-creation however has marketing challenges with the establishment of ambiences that programs the freedom of consumers to exist in ways that allow harnessing of new liberated consumers and productive capabilities (Lury, 2004).
The exchange of value and production of products or service depends mostly on capturing and generating iterative social communication as well as cooperation among consumers and corporations and consumers themselves. The principles of co-creation demonstrate the reconfiguration of power and labor characteristic of knowledge based and contemporary capitalism (Prahalad, 2000). Putting customers to work is not entirely a new idea. For example, the increase in rationalized processes of the Facebook world that has relied much on appropriating customer work. Facebook allows its users to share their personal information on the website and also collects information from the `like` option then sells the data to other advertising websites hence earning money through the information shared. This makes the company successful and more profitable. Hereby, the co-creation concept illustrates how Facebook transfers the logic of consumer work from the production sphere and process efficiency to innovation and development of a new product (Ritzer, 2004). Economy of co-creation involves experiments of value creation new possibilities, which are based on expropriation of technological, affective, cultural and social labor of the customer masses.
Based on the consumer cooperation, co-creation demonstrates a dialogical model that does not privilege the vision of a company on production but what constitutes on the customer value or the marketing profession. In this case, rather than make customers work to rationalize the process of production as well as focus on their efficiency, calculability and predictability, co-creation aspires in building ambience which accommodates playfulness, contingency and experimentation among consumers (Arvidsson, 2005).
The co-creation emergence makes less effort for marketers to support individualist consumers or individualize consumption articulations as pursuit of difference and distinction. It enables companies like Facebook to manage intensified uncertainties regarding the market demand by attaching the consumption to innovation, production and marketing process. Therefore, corporations are set to secure the work knowledge of consumers collectively as a repository of creative ideas as well as a force of advancing innovation to produce profits in future under international competitive capitalism. The government of consumers creates active consumers whose creative, voluntary and independent activities effectively be directed into raw products for the company’s commodity production. Hereby, the labor of consumers becomes expropriated as surplus since it is not paid for labor and does not contribute necessarily to the ability of consumers to buy goods (Reed, 2005). Therefore, co-creation indeed exploits consumers.
References
Arvidsson, A. (2005). Brands: A critical perspective. Journal of consumer culture. London: Routledge.
Lury, C. (2004). Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy. London: Routledge.
Prahalad, C. (2002). The Co-creation Connection. Toronto: York University.
Prahalad, C. (2000). Co-opting Customer Competence. Boston: Havard Business School.
Reed, D. (2005). Airlines make Internet Work for Them. Viewed 14 Aug 2007. Ritzer, G. (2004). The McDonaldization of Society. California: Thousand Oaks.