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Special Issue on Technology’s Transformation of People, Products and Brands

Journal of Product and Brand Management

Deadline for submissions: 30th June, 2015

Guest Editors

• Prof. Leyland Pitt, Dennis F. Culver EMBA Alumni Chair of Business, Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, Email: lpitt@sfu.ca
• Prof. Pierre Berthon, Clifford Youse Chair of Marketing, McCallum Graduate School of Business, Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA, Email: pberthon@bentley.edu

Introduction

Technology transforms product and service offerings, people and brands. Consider the iPhone, the product that created the smartphone category. This smartphone technology has transformed products. It has replaced a whole host of once discrete categories of offerings including: the watch, the alarm, the calendar, the address book, the digital camera, the pocket calculator, inexpensive personal computers, public telephones and in-car navigation systems. Simultaneously, it has transformed people – its ability to record video, picture and sound has turned the citizen into a reporter, and more commonly transformed individuals once engaged in their environments into spectators, who film crimes rather than intervene, and take movies of rock concerts rather than watch and listen. The selfie is replacing social engagement. It has also transformed brands – for example, it has changed Apple from a functional brand into the epitome of cool, from a personal computer manufacturer into an arbiter of public taste.

At the same time, consumers transform technologies and brands. They use products and services for other purposes than those they were originally intended for and modify the proprietary offerings of firms. They repurpose brands they love or hate.

These are the phenomena that this special issue will address: How do technologies (and not just smart phones) transform other products, consumers, and brands?¹ And how do consumers transform technologies and brands?

This special issue focuses on how consumers and technologies transform consumption. On the one hand it seeks submissions that look at the way in which technology transforms both categories of consumption and consumers themselves. And on the other hand, it solicits work that considers how consumers transform products, services, and indeed, brands, both in terms of the ways in which technology is used, and the various meanings these objects and offerings can have. Obviously the compliment to transformation is persistence. While technology and consumers transform, some products and brands persist, and even resist transformation. For example, in the cases of so-called “slow innovations”, despite overwhelming evidence that the frequent and vigorous washing of hands in operating theaters and in hospital settings will significantly reduce infection rates, medical staff still tend to ignore requests to do so. Therefore the special edition also seeks to publish work that addresses the issues of offering persistence and resistance.

We invite submissions on a broad range of topics in this regard, and welcome both conceptual and empirical contributions. Some suggestions for broad themes include: Creation of new categories of product and service offerings

• Destruction of product categories
• Integration of diverse categories of products
• Persistence of technologies and products (despite better or superior alternatives)
• How technologies transform consumers and create new markets
• How do consumers repurpose technologies, using them for purposes other than their original intent?
• How technological transformation impacts existing brands and enables the birth of new brands.
• How to manage products and offerings that have been “technologically transformed” (e.g. what should digital camera manufacturers and watchmakers do?)
• How to manage brands that have been transformed through technology? (A case in point: What could Nokia have done?)

All papers need to be submitted online to the Special Issue on “Technology’s Transformation of People, Products and Brands” through the . For informal enquiries you can contact the guest editors.

Deadline for submissions: 30th June, 2015.

¹Berthon, P.R., Hulbert, J.M., and Pitt, L.F. (2005) Consuming Technology: Why Marketers Sometimes Get It Wrong, California Management Review, Fall, 88, 1, 110-128.

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