CultureLabel

For the cultural entrepreneur, consumer empowerment places a premium on cultural literacy, creativity and symbolic knowledge as sources of power. Socio-cultural factors outweigh traditional production factors in determining the viability of a cultural product. Whereas in other industries, the ‘quality of the idea’ may be sufficient to predict success against, the cultural entrepreneur must contemplate and balance a much wider range of factors.

Symbolic content, relative value

In the cultural and creative industries, although ‘real’ or ‘material’ elements exist (e.g. the CD case or the canvas of an artwork), the value of cultural products is primarily located within their symbolic content. This severely diminishes the importance of the physical embodiment, and consequently, the production imperative. Rifkin characterises the ‘new economy’ as a sale of “ideas and images”: “The physical embodiment of these ideas and images becomes increasingly secondary to the economic process…. The network economy is characterised by access to concepts, carried inside physical forms.”

Bilton further argues that “the balance shifts decisively away from the product’s material function towards a more subjective set of values. It is not clear what ‘useful’ purpose the product is expected to serve.” Since physical forms are merely vehicles to deliver symbolic content, the marketing function of an enterprise assumes a corresponding sovereignty over the production function.

Significantly, this is beginning to occur in traditional industries as well as newer ones. Cagan and Vogel, for example, stress that new manufactured products must be developed and sold on the basis of ‘telling and selling’ dreams. Production therefore increasingly relies on a range of subjective judgements, in an attempt to deliver ‘good’ symbolic content. In Rifkin’s view, for example, the production imperative is “increasingly viewed as a back-office function of marketing.”

King Consumer

The need to actively interpret and decode symbolic content in cultural products means that the consumer acquires a much greater role in judging its value, and consequently in empowering the cultural entrepreneur. Value judgements depend upon “a cluster of subjective associations for the individual consumer.” These associations, Fiske argues, result from an individual’s particular social context; their history, social formation, and complex social and textual cultural history. A ‘negotiated reading’ occurs, a process of negotiation between the dominant ideology of the text and its variously socially-situated readers. In consequence, Morley argued, “the meaning of the text will be constructed differently according to the discourses (knowledges, prejudices, resistances, etc.) brought to bear on the text by the reader…”

In addition to the social context of the consumer, Fiske also highlights the mode of reception and group discussions around the text as critical to making a subjective value judgement. Consumers are rarely dominated or controlled by cultural products, and discussion helps shape opinions, by “activating and circulating meanings of the text that resonate with the cultural needs of that particular talk community.” Consumers are increasingly viewed as the active creators of meaning, as individuals and as part of a group.

For the cultural entrepreneur, therefore, this consumer empowerment places a premium on cultural literacy. Understanding consumers and consumption habits, market research, and the ability to spot and utilise trends is paramount. Talking to customers and potential customers, reading as far and wide as possible, attending key events and seminars… Such critical and priceless tools so often fall to the bottom of the ‘to do’ list in daily reality of work schedules.