Open Access

Jochen SträhleORCiD, Yasmin Wagner

• Customer needs and requirements are getting increasingly diverse and consumers more and more want to express their individuality with the products they buy. Due to the emergence of the internet and possibilities given, customers no longer only play a passive role, but are actually enabled to determine what they are purchasing. Therefore customisation or personlisation approaches like the miadidas concept from adidas, providing customised performance shoes or sneakers are more popular than ever. The prosumer concept already plays an important role trying to satisfy the demands of customers in future. As apparel for outdoor activities represents the largest and most important part of the sports good market in Germany and is yet still expected to grow, the purpose of this study is, on the one hand to identify diverse prosumer concepts existing and on the other hand to examine to what extent companies of the outdoor industry already have implemented prosumer concepts. A content analysis of homepages and online shops of 30 different European and North American outdoor brands was conducted. Results show, that companies of the outdoor industry have already implemented several prosumer concepts, but most of them are mainly concentrating on one prosumer approach and the involvement of professional users of their products.