Collaboration and Participation Traditional Leadership Theories and Bottom-Up Consumer Driver Challenge to Branding

Chapter 4 - Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?

Summary of Reading

This chapter delves into the ideology of convergence and how it has evolved the traditional “grassroots” methods of creativity. Originally creativity and the sharing of ideas, methods, and processes experienced a much greater closed captive audience. Quilting bees passed the craft down to others; people became apprentices to learn a trade, etc. These original types of passing and sharing of creative innovations, skill and new ideas are now experiencing the availability of mass audience and the opportunity to share their ideas with everyone, no longer is creativity restricted waiting for that big break; now individual creativity as a way to experience instant notoriety. The chapter also discusses the ramifications of this and how it develops a consumer up influence on existing brands and the ongoing battle of producer vs. fan over the amount of freedom and creative license consumers can take with producers existing ideas.

Key Ideas

1) The web is a tool utilized by mass members of society as a “distribution channel” for original-grassroots traditions and new individualistic cultural based products by everyday mass audience. For this reason, the web has created an atmosphere of extensive consumer-based participation that has created a controversial relationship between producers trying to protect their branding and consumers who are enthralled with their product and utilize it for creative purposes.

2) The traditional foundation of grassroots folk culture was strengthened and built by passing down of skills, etc. from members of the communities from many countries and a blending of cultures, now, convergence has created a culture where the avenue of “media conglomerates” becomes foundation where participation and commercial exist together. This phenomenon puts additional power in the hands of consumers who now have the ability to choose how, when, where and if they will share their grassroots creativity within the contexts of produced brands; web gives amateur consumers an avenue into the public spectrum.

3) This avenue to public has created a conflict between producers wanting to protect their brands and ideas and the consumers who feel the necessity and the right of sharing creative license with the existing brands. This conflict has led to many types of tactics for protection, laws, games, fanforums and the conflict continues to exist. Many producers are finding that the traditional ideologies of leadership in a transformational sense, allowing consumers to actively participate and feel ownership is reaping benefits for all; it is allowing grassroots creators to actively participate in things that are culturally important to them. Producers are finding that collaboration style of this conflict management is a positive for their bottom-line.

4) Convergence has created a gray area for producers and consumers when it comes to how to regulate the amount of participatory levels and what rules they should all play by.

5) It is clear that producers need consumers and consumers need producers, that fact is indisputable.

Difficult or Challenging Concept

I really enjoyed this weeks reading and really didn’t find the concept hard to understand, however, I would like to know, once a product or brand is released to the mass audience of the public, can producers really say hey its mine. They are the ones that made the money by mass production and distribution, so in essence, they created their own monster. It’s a two-way street; convergence makes them money but also gives them the risk of loosing their hold on license.

Questions

What leadership concepts to you recognize in producer handling of this new evolution of bottom-up culture?

Do you feel, as they seem to be finding, that collaboration is the best means of conflict management in this situation?

Does this means of mass distribution of grassroots culture take away from the original concept passing down traditions one to another, does it spoil this concept?

Relation to Paper

This week’s reading relates to my paper with the concept of solving of virtual group conflict with traditional theories of leadership management. The chapter recognized collaboration, transformational leadership theory (allowing consumers ownership and participation), etc.