CONSUMER CONTRIBUTION TO PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN THE NORDIC SPORTS
5. Discussion: Passionate consumers and consumer goods industries
We studied four different types of passionate lead users in our study on user involvement in the sports industry. These different types of passionate users contributed to company strategies in product development in several ways, by making suggestions to the product features (user innovators, professional athletes, enthusiastic amateurs) and giving visibility to the brand (professional athletes).
Passionate insiders share knowledge with user communities and translate their knowing into company strategies. We will next briefly discuss what other consumer goods industries could benefit from our study in the sports industry and what happens when the involved users are not passionate as in the case of sports industry.
Shah (2005) argues that users innovate whenever they have the means and interests to do so. She takes examples not only from sports but also from the automobile industry (customizing), personal computers, user firms in the 18th century iron industry and amateur astronomy. We argue that similar categories of passionate users we found in the sports industry can also be recognized in other areas of B-to-C markets, such as amateur gastronomy.
The food industry could offer an interesting area of research from this perspective. “User innovators” in this area could be the ones who combine exciting ingredients in experiential cooking and whose experiments have unofficial connections with corporate product development. For example people enjoying chocolate together with candy containing ammoniac could inspire a company to develop chocolate bars containing ammoniac. “Professional athletes”
could be equated with well-known TV-chefs who are used in commercials for branding. “Enthusiastic amateurs” in food are the ones who create peer-to-peer values of consuming certain ingredients and cooking equipment and set trends for
example for organic food or adding goji berries into diet or using silicone cooking ware for steaming vegetables. “Passionate insiders” in the food industry are those innovators within companies who contribute to the product development with new experiments with ingredients and ideas informed by their insight into global food trends.
We can recognize similar categories of passionate lead users also in the fashion industry, which is lead user intensive, has domain specific innovativeness, and is based on symbolic values. User innovators, we argue, are those who take the meanings of fashion items in their own hands and change their reference system in a way that is no longer guided by fashion institutions, companies and designers. There are numerous of examples of this mechanism of reframing the meaning system through consumption and use. For example, the famous textile pattern by Burberry that used to refer to conservative values and wealth – and still does so in the US and mainland Europe – was taken into the hands of young unschooled working class people, the chavs in the UK. What could be referred to as user innovators' action was answered by the Burberry Company with more radical campaigns where fashion icon Kate Moss starred in a scandalous setting and Emma Watson, famous from Harry Potter, helped to reinvent the brand. The celebrities who are sponsored by fashion houses and dressed by stylists represent an allegory for professional athletes. Fashion bloggers are enthusiastic amateurs who share their findings and opinions on fashion on a daily basis in the social media. People who are passionate about fashion and design and do it for a living, the passionate insiders, are found not only in fashion houses and in the fashion media but also in the marketing departments of a variety of companies that have links to fashion, such as consumer electronics.
The implications of lead user involvement in product development in consumer goods can be considered important at least for three reasons. First, consuming involves passion that cannot be recognized and measured without involving users into the product development. Secondly, preferences and experience of practices and routines of everyday life can be studied with (and not without) consumers because the consumer approach to the practices of everyday life is different from the industry approach. Thirdly, trend forecasting involves users and especially lead users’ insight. Much of current “professionalism” is formulated among laypeople and passionate groups of people operating within their local and global net-based communities. This leads to political and industrial actors’ need to cooperate with peer-to-peer networks of people. (cf. Heiskanen et al. 2010; Bloch 1986)
However, not all consumers are active and passionate about product development nor all products that are being developed. Then, what consequences are there for user involvement when the users involved into product development carried out in companies are laypeople without particular interests in what is being developed? This issue of indifference does not gain particular attention in marketing research because of a distinct division of what takes place within a company and what takes place on markets, i.e. amongst consumers. Besides, many elements of consumption can be considered ordinary or routinized rather than extraordinary, which would require passion (cf. Ilmonen 2001)
Nevertheless, when involving consumers as persons in the product development of companies, new issues arise. Firstly, it is a challenge to involve consumers without making them any more or less passionate than they were before the involvement. Secondly, once involved, the representativity of such consumers can be considered questionable. There seems to be a trade off between the number of involved consumers and the intensity of involvement. From the perspective of this paper, yet another representativity issue emerges: companies should recognize that the category of the involved consumer easily shifts from "a representative layperson" to an enthusiastic amateur in the involvement process.
In a set of user involvement exercises organized to support the development of interactive web services such as mobile blogging, speech recognition services, intelligent news readers and community television, this risk became apparent (Heiskanen et al. 2007). In order for the involved users - i.e. laypeople - to be able to actively participate in the product development of companies, they were first asked to try out the prototype services as these were meant to be used. This procedure turned out very useful in the sense that it focused user involvement and therefore lead to outcomes that the companies could more readily make use of.
During this process, however, the involved laypeople were transformed to experts. This became particularly evident in focus group interviews, where the users confidently acted as experts and gave guidance to company representatives on how they should proceed with product development. In addition to performing a basic technical test of the prototype, the users readily proposed solutions and new service concepts. Laypeople became empowered users i.e. passionate consumers due to the involvement process.
Creating passionate users through involvement is a process with both benefits and disadvantages. It is beneficial for those companies who want to make sure that involved users become at least somewhat passionate about the products being developed. This might well be why the Nordic companies operating in the sports industry have opted to involve passionate users. On the other hand, those
companies that wish to involve non-passionate users may find the creation of passion and expertise problematic and should recognize the changes of the intense and knowledge of the user involved.
It should also be recognized that the potential of layman and professional knowing is different. When laymen are asked to contribute to a product development process their needs and potential solutions are constrained by their real world experience. Von Hippel (1986) suggests that they are thus unlikely to generate novel product concepts that would be in conflict with the familiar.
Recognizing this limitation especially in studies of emerging markets make a note that the real world experience is simultaneously an advantage of user involvement when understanding users’ daily practices and routines is a fruitful ground for product development, and when the products lie in the range of the user’s daily experience (Shove et al. forthcoming). Yet, the involvement of lead users is significant source of product innovations in sports industry and can be fruitful also in other consumer goods industries as we have discussed here.
6. Conclusions
Consumers have been acknowledged to be a part of the production systems of companies (Toffler 1980; Wikström 1996). Consumption then essentially means actively participating in the production of the consumer product, service or experience. Similarly, consumers have the potential of becoming a part of a product development system (cf. Lindhoff and Ölander 1971, Grunert 2006).
This paper has reflected on how consumers and users have been involved in product development in the Nordic sports industry. We have studied four key consumer and user groups in the product development sports equipment and services: user innovators, professional athletes, enthusiastic amateurs and passionate insiders. These groups take part in the product development of the companies.
It is noteworthy that the identified groups all consist of passionate consumers and users. It appears that such passionate consumers have been easy and beneficial to involve in the product development of the companies. It would even appear that involvement procedures may themselves create passionate consumers.
In the Nordic sports industry, the focus of involvement is more on users than consumers. This follows the mainstream of academic literature, while user innovation scholars often take one step further and focus on lead users. Users are
conceptually more contextually constrained and typically more identifiable than consumers because they are an essential part of the use of the product, service or experience.
When these findings are applied to other industries, an interesting shift of focus can be noticed: laypeople usually form focus groups in market studies and consumer studies. Much of creative and innovative activity stems from everyday behaviour of regular people (Shah 2005), including product, services and experiences which consumers are not particularly passionate about.
While addressing passionate consumers and users is a re-occurring theme in research and business practices, we argue that it would be beneficial to pay attention to non-passionate consumers. Consumer routines and practices may prove difficult to introduce in product development without involving non-passionate consumers. This could very well be the next big challenge for consumer involvement in product development.
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