REPUDIATE INDIVIDUAL BRANDS AS A RESULT OF REPULSION?

Repudiate individual brands as a result of personal attraction and repulsion?



Repudiate individual brands as a result of personal attraction and repulsion?

Introduction

High profile brands dominate consumers' product knowledge, and commonly spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt regarding non-branded offerings. As brands become dominant they have the potential to reduce consumers' perceived choice, actual choice, product knowledge, search confidence and trust. Consumers can justifiably feel trapped and disempowered, and as a result, attempt to escape perceived brand hegemony. Open source software (OSS) is in many respects the antithesis of brand dominance and is often perceived in the popular press as a competitor to proprietary software. Indeed, a central tenet of the OSS community is the abhorrence of copyright, which is viewed as monopolistically inappropriate for public property, and for holding source code to ransom. Closer examination reveals that the community itself is not particularly competition-focused.

Discussion

Brand communities as envisioned in the literature are communities of consumption. Vargo and Lusch (2004) speak of consumers' involvement in the process of value co-creation, defined along the lines of Alderson's (1957, p. 69) “whole process of creating utility”. That is, value co-creation includes those services (customization, implementation, learning and so forth) which enable the consumer to satisfy the unique needs for which the product was purchased (to use the old rubric). This appears nearly identical to the concept of prosumption, a term first coined by Toffler (1980) to describe limited consumer involvement in product design and manufacture, principally individualizing standardized products, and more recently applied in services marketing ([Kotler, 1986] and Yamaguchi, 1990 K. Yamaguchi, Fundamentals of a new economic paradigm in the information age, Futures 22 (10) (1990), p. 1023. Both terms maintain the traditional idea of producer and consumer as separate entities. They imply a linear, or flow, model of production and consumption, in which the consumer is generally downstream from the producer (albeit with input into their individual product finishes). But the purpose of this is still largely to optimize the vendor's production to best meet the downstream customer's needs.

Open source brands

Pitt et al., 2006 L.F. Pitt, R.T. Watson, P. Berthon, D. Wynn and G. Zinkhan, The penguin's window: corporate brands from an open-source perspective, J Acad Mark Sci 34 (2) (2006), pp. 115-127. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus (10)Pitt et al. (2006) outline the evolution of brands, in which they state that Open Source (OS) brands are the fourth and final phase of brand evolution (p.120). They base this on an historical view of brand development, starting with Commodity Branding, in which brands do little for either producer or consumer. Commodity Branding then gave way to Branded Consumer Goods, in which producers were able to obtain greater benefit. They suggest the current state of brand practice is the third phase, Strong Brands, which maximize benefits to both producers and consumers. The fourth and final phase is OS brands in which consumer benefits remain strong, but producers lose much ...