Marketing, Economics, and the Web 2.0

Much of the research I am doing for nGenera’s Marketing & Sales 2.0 program is focused on what we call prosumerism. While I’m sure some eyes will roll in reference to yet another buzzword, I find it to be a useful one. It describes the process by which customers are becoming actively involved in the innovation and communication around the products and services they consume (i.e. producer + consumer  = prosumer). Once you really start digging in, it is an extremely rich and interesting topic – but it can often get a little confusing.

Because of this when I speak about prosumerism, I like to start by looking at some questions around a very special Dilbert cartoon. Dilbert cartoons, as most people know, poke fun at society and particularly workplace culture, usually highlighting some absurdity that people can relate to. But in this case what I’m saying is that, for perhaps the first time in history, we can argue that companies need to start acting more like Dilbert cartoons, rather than less.

The reason I can say this is because last year, Scott Adams made a major change to the Dilbert.com site – they turned it into a Dilbert Mash up platform. Every day when Scott publishes his new cartoon, an alternate version goes up. In this alternate version,  the images are present in each of the three boxes, but the text in only the first two. Anyone could then login and add their own punchline to the cartoon (it’s since evolved to include Group mash ups and other things I’ll talk about later).To tie it back to the opening lingo, the site is now a prosumer platform.

I was participating in this quite a bit last year, so effectively Scott Adams and I were co-creating cartoons, such as this one:

Please, hold the applause… and the laughter is becoming overwhelming .

Back to the story. So this looks like a cute, fun little example – what could the possible business implications be? Well, let’s start by looking at the perspective of Scott Adams and United Media – why would he/they do this? And would you do the same thing in their place? Would your company – and how would the decision get made?

Think about it for a second – pretend you are part of Dilbert Inc.,  a large company that owns Dilbert (perhaps having negotiated and deal with Scott, and having acquired the syndication rights from United Media). You pull all the senior executives into a room and you all start talking about things like your core value proposition. I would argue that in this situation a significant number of people might argue that the punch line is rather core to the value proposition for a cartoon. By extension, I think many of these people would argue that you absolutely, positively cannot open it up – a company built around making people laugh can’t give up control of the joke, can they?

But they did – anyone can now offer their own punchline, and use their comics in a variety of ways, so long as they don’t violate the terms of use (notably including prosumers can’t make any money off of them). So what are the possible implications (cost /benefit) of opening it up? And are the interests of this larger (fictional) company and the initial comic creator (Scott Adams) aligned? I can’t find it anymore for some reason, but a while back Scott Adams was interviewed about this and said something to the effect of “I expect my punch lines to be funnier 99% of the time. For that other 1%, I hope it’s different people every time. If it’s just one person, I hope they can’t draw.” While I personally doubt Scott Adams is actually concerned at all, the “quote” is indicative of the issues that consistently pop up when companies start adopting prosumer and collaborative strategies.

But now set that to the side, and as a next step just accept that the decision was made. What are the corporate equivalents of characters and images (i.e. the drawings) being core, and some of the conversation (i.e. the punch line) being open? At the risk of getting to cute, I think you can draw a direct parallel here to what many companies and marketers are facing in the world of social media and word-of-mouth promotion – while you can do most of the set-up, the eventual “punch line” that is communicated is not only increasingly out of your control, it varies from person to person (assuming different people are seeing different people’s mash ups).

Now again, the purpose here is not necessarily to answer these questions just yet (and of course if you want the real answers for why Scott Adams did what he did, you could ask him yourself), though you are welcome to add some thoughts to the comments if you’d like. Rather, it’s to use the Dilbert example as a thought starter about how, and why, other companies might want to consider adopting some of the prosumer strategies.

Next up in this series – questions around why might individuals engage with this, and what’s the role of the community?