In 1972, Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt suggested in their book Take Today, (p. 4) that with electric technology, the consumer would become a producer.

Prosumer is becoming a fairly common term, but can be confusing, as it has two meanings.

It was coined in 1980 by the futurist Alvin Toffler — in his book The Third Wave – as a blend of producer and consumer. He used it to describe a possible future type of consumer who would become involved in the design and manufacture of products, so they could be made to individual specification. He argued that we would then no longer be a passive market upon which industry dumped consumer goods but a part of the creative process.

Derrick de Kerckhove has called this mass customization, in which everybody is in effect a member of a niche market, something Internet e-commerce is encouraging through cutting out the middleman between maker and buyer. This sense of prosumer has been taken up by some marketing people, but remains limited in its application.

The second usage describes a purchaser of technical equipment who wants to obtain goods of a better quality than consumer items, but can’t afford professional items (older terms for goods of this intermediate quality are semi-professional and industrial quality). Here, the word is a blend of professional and consumer. Prosumers of this sort are famed for their enthusiasm for new products and their tolerance of flaws and, from the marketing point of view, have much in common with early adopters. This usage is common among those selling video equipment, digital cameras, and similar goods. Some manufacturers treat the SOHO (Small Office, Home Office) market as being much the same thing.

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Prosumer.ca subscribes more to Alvin Toffler's meaning in the "business 2 business" sense, where consumers are increasingly becoming sophisticated buyers, and businesses on all levels must pay attention to changing trends and spending habits and respond accordingly by providing a wider range of products and value added services. The objective - to compete and remain profitable.


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