Customer Co-Production from Social Factory to Brand : Learning from Italian Fashion

This chapter attempts to address historicize forms of customer coproduction. Drawing on the development of Italian fashion, it presents two historical ideal types of how customers have been integrated within the value chains of the culture and creative industries - "social factory" and "brand." In the "social factory" model, customers (and other external actors) are mainly used to supply input for product innovation. In the "brand" phase the productive contribution of customers becomes not primarily that of developing new products, but of co-creating an environment in which certain kinds of value conventions can operate. This entails different strategies of governance, such as the marketing of a generic form of "creativity" as a social ideal, which can easily be confused with emancipatory developments.