Consumers at work,or curiosity at play? Revisiting the prosumption/value cocreation debate with smartphones and two-dimensional bar codes

Abstract

As Cova and colleagues recently noted (Cova and Dalli, 2009; Cova et al., 2011), there is a growing body of literature showing that consumers are solicited not only as partners but also as active workers or “partial employees,” enrolled for their intellectual but also physical competencies, so that the vague and symmetrical scheme of “coproduction” ends up into a clear and asymmetrical model of “working consumer” (Dujarier, 2014). This article stresses the paradoxical character of this literature; on one hand, it presents coproduction as a consequence of the emergence of the gifted, competent, skilled active consumers. But, on the other hand, the same literature tends to show that consumers’ inputs are called for without them being fully aware of it, as if they were acting naively and passively. This article proposes to reflect on this paradox from the empirical case of the use of bidimensional bar codes. Based on a series of experiments in focus groups, the article shows that consumers’ work must be put “in its right place”; one should acknowledge its existence but also reassess its meaning, role, and place.