A creative consumer is defined as any "individual or group who adapt, modify, or transform a proprietary offering".
Examples include: In 2005, The Economist published an article about the future of innovation, ‘The rise of the creative consumer’.
[2] This article explained that some companies rely on identifying and leveraging the innovation potential of creative consumers.
Hotz, Avila, and Hill all received negative, and in some cases threatening, reactions from the companies whose products and services they had repurposed.
Berthon, et al., proposed that companies can take four general stances on creative consumers.