The development of communication and information technologies, like the Internet, has revolutionized forms of communication in a way never seen before. One of the main evidences of this fact is that people are joining together, forming online relationship groups known as virtual communities. The purpose of this paper is to identify the trends as to the future of virtual communities from the perspective of a specific user profile, the prosumer. To do so, combinations of different qualitative techniques were used, involving images, in-depth interviews, projective techniques and scenario analysis. The results obtained suggest that the use and participation trends of virtual communities, from the point of view of prosumers, are linked to more innovative scenarios, where there is a greater active participation by users, more involvement of people, the adoption of new technologies and forms of access. Furthermore, they show how important it is to consider them in marketing policies and the influence they will have in the future on consumers and on the prosumption process.
Virtual communities; prosumers; technology; consumer behavior; communication
