The Cultural Mediators in the Innovation Process
In many ways, this ‘gap’ between the original constituency, whether a group of enthusiastic amateurs, engineers or inventors, and the future wider group of buyers is what marketing and advertising departments try to fill in by offering ready-made models of life-styles and cultural practices that new products and services can fit into. For instance, in order to export Nordic walking sticks (Shove and Pantzar 2005), the company producing them has, very concretely, to export and make meaningful a totally new practice of walking with two sticks. When exported to other countries from Finland, the practice is radically transformed and effectively become quite another practice.
As Hennion et al. (1989) show, modern marketing and advertising are often as important a part of the process of product development as the scientific-technical laboratories and innovation centres of firms or universities. The gap between the producer and the seller, on the one hand, and the buyer or final customer, on the other hand, is not just a practical one. Their perspectives and the principles guiding their choices differ in principle (see Schulze 1992). Therefore, consumers have always played an active and creative part in the transformation of an invention into an innovation. Their role as co-innovators, however, has only recently received serious attention in innovation studies (McMeekin and Southerton 2007; cf. also Pantzar 1997). The consumer is as much the heroic innovator as the entrepreneur.
More often than not, innovations do not follow the original instructions for use suggested by their inventors or the entrepreneur who actively promotes them. Bell’s telephone is already a classical example. He expected it to be used strictly for business and he could hardly imagine its use for pleasure and socializing. Today, by contrast, big corporations that actively promote and invest in new inventions try more systematically and extensively to integrate customers into an active role in the innovation process from the beginning (Kotro and Pantzar 2002: 39). On the other hand, an overwhelming majority of the novelties that reach the consumer goods market each year are more likely to be small variations or improvements on older products and therefore find a ready-made slot in the customary patterns of consumption. ‘Big’ innovations demanding drastic changes in the lives of their consumers are, after all, quite rare. Such revolutionary innovations do not appear on the market weekly or monthly and probably not even annually. It still makes sense to think of some important technical inventions, like automobiles, radios, TVs, refrigerators or the instruments of modern communication technology, as turning points or markers of historical periods in modern consumer society. It is, however, remarkable how different the time trajectories of many familiar items of home electronics and durables have been in different European countries (Tellis et al. 2003: 190). Quite often the original function of a new technical invention has been turned into its opposite, from ‘toys’ to ‘instruments’, from ‘instruments’ to ‘pleasure’ (Kotro and Pantzar 2002).
Fads, Fashions and ‘Real’ Innovations
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