Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
9.3
Bringing Ideas and Companies Together
Over the past decade, research has viewed the customer as a component of the busi-
ness model, but the business model literature has recently emphasized going further
and considering the customer as a “content generator” (Plé et al.
2010
). Companies
need to both market to and collaborate with their customers. This is more important
today, especially given generation Y's tendency to actively share, contribute, search,
and work using social media and its expectation that it will participate in value co-
creation (Bolton et al.
2013
). “Considering the gradual shift towards co-creative
media work and a corresponding industry-wide framing of the audience as collabo-
rators or otherwise 'active' publics, the key issues moderating such corporate appro-
priation of participatory culture are notions of transparency (of all parties involved)
and control (over all communications),” as Mark Deuze (
2008
) argued. From this, it
becomes clear that the broad participatory culture is becoming more democratic,
because users are enabled to produce culture themselves, and not just to listen or
follow the prewritten rules, without an active engagement in such content creation.
LEGO business could thus be built through the incorporation of customer interac-
tion as a core value generation strategy.
According to the recent data from the LEGO Group, there are more than 200
LEGO User Groups with over 135.000 registered members; more than 400 events
organized, with over six million visitors at these events in 2012; 1,170,000 LEGO
movies on YouTube, where top fi ve videos has over 100 million views combined;
over 1.400.000 LEGO tagged images on Flickr; hundreds of LEGO related blogs;
thousands of LEGO-related websites, etc. For example, a YouTube
Lego Star
Wars - For the millionth time, I didn't make this video
, uploaded in 2005 has been
viewed by 30,887,650 people since
1
[Accessed: July 27, 2014]; Henrik Ludvigsen,
from Roskilde in Denmark, spent GBP 50,000 and 18 months planning creation of
the world's largest LEGO railway
2
; Alice Finch built a massive LEGO Hogwarts
from 400,000 bricks,
3
a mini-scale rendition of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft &
Wizardry from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series of topics and the corresponding
movies; and inspired by fantasy buildings featured in sagas like Star Wars and The
Lord of the Rings, LEGO fan Gerry Burrows built an impressive 250,000 LEGO-
Brick Mega-Structure called the Garrison of Moriah.
4
Having realized the amazing
number of diverse posts, images, and videos of LEGO creations on numerous online
platforms, the LEGO Group celebrated those creations with the ReBrick,
5
a social
bookmarking platform where adult users can share, organize, and discuss
2
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2364154/Lego-fan-builds-worlds-longest-toy-train-
3
http://www.brothers-brick.com/2013/02/26/alice-finch-builds-massive-lego-
5
LEGO Rebrick [online] Available at:
http://rebrick.lego.com/
.
Accessed 15 July 2014
