Frugal Innovation and Innovative Creation

4Technology and Symbolic Spectacle of Marking by Use

Organizations (crossed by innovative communities, upstream of creation) are focused on usage downstream. Borrowing from several disciplines, we propose here an exploratory study on the mutations in progress concerning virtual communities of use: as much by the behaviors and practices on the Internet of technological exacerbation as by the trivialization of the brand becoming an element, among others, in a more global logic of marking. The angle of approach is necessarily multidisciplinary, even though a possible anchor point can be marketing.

Through the prism of Internet usage, and by taking an interest in marking, we operate a rereading (of a rather socio-anthropological nature) that goes beyond the question of the brand: our approach is therefore not in itself centered on the brand, but on marking, both real and digital, with community staging of the individual (community self) on Internet. The virtual community self can be considered as an extension of the concept of self (Rosenberg 1979) through the self-image (sociologically situated by belonging to a collective) and where the desired (and/or acquired) goods, as an extension of the self (extended self), participate symbolically in this image (Belk 1988) but are worthy of the gaze of others (Miniard and Cohen 1983).

Marking is not a very assertive field in the Human and Social Sciences (HSS). According to the Petit Robert dictionary, marking is an “operation by which ...