Zazzle Dazzles in a Blended Future

Follow-up to the From Old School to Beyond New Persuasion post showing the various types of company/customer relationships.   We predicted a blended future for this relationship -   difficult to tell where the company leaves off and the customer begins.  Almost a complete merging of company and customers.

We were hard pressed to come up with examples (Firefox web browser, online video games) - but Erick Schonfeld at B2DAY blog has a doozy.  Zazzle.com.  He wonders why two of Google's early investors just put $16 million into Zazzle.  He quotes one of the investors:

It allows people to express their creativity in digital form and then allows them to turn those into products either for themselves or for other people. I clearly was not just looking at it from the perspective of T-shirts and posters. I think this idea ultimately can be bigger.

What we here at newpersuasion call a blended future, Schonfeld calls "The Culture of Participation."  In his latest Future Boy column at Business 2.0, he delves into this culture:

Zazzle is more than just a do-it-yourself site. Many people choose to make their photos or artwork available to anyone who visits. Zazzle has thousands of branded images on the site, but hundreds of thousands more are contributed by individuals. Members generally receive a 10 percent royalty every time one of their images is used for a T-shirt or poster Zazzle sells. (Disney and Fox get many times more than that.) "The marketplace succeeds only if we can offer something for everyone," explains Zazzle CEO Robert Beaver. That's why he offers the full spectrum, from Winnie the Pooh posters to sci-fi artwork created by freelance graphic designers. It's worth noting, however, that the majority of Beaver's sales (he won't reveal an exact figure but claims it's in the millions) come from the customer-generated images.  Zazzle takes the idea of consumer participation (and mass customization) to a new level. Not only is there an almost infinite variety of product combinations that consumers can create on the site, but if they don't find what they like, they can add their own digital creations to the mix.

And I agree 100% with his conclusion.

Someday the culture of participation will enable not only personalized stamps but personalized fabrication of things like electronics, automobiles, and furniture. Somebody just has to figure out how to bring computer-aided design software to the masses... It's not such a crazy idea. If the Web teaches us anything, it's that a lot of people out there would rather make things themselves than rely on some company (or corporate IT person, for that matter) to do it for them.

This sure goes along with newpersuasion thinking about being included.