Marketing the Craft of Making—A Case Study of How to Enable Experience Economy Alternatives to Product

The chapter shares insights from a funded research project that allowed academics, technical specialists, and makers in Scotland and India to collaboratively consider digital entrepreneurship opportunities around heritage craft narratives. The “Covid lockdown impact on craft capacity,” or CLICC project started at the height of the COVID-19 disruption to supply chains and travel in the summer of 2020, and explored how new realities around digital instead of analogue engagement might help to shock a languishing sustainability agenda into the mainstream of production and consumption of craft. The team enlisted potential consumers to shape broad content parameters for what digital making narratives might constitute and who the target audience might be, before employing artisans to produce moving image pilots of their craft in order to determine hardware, technical skills and content guidance needs. The close dialogue with these stakeholders in craft narrative informed CLICC’s development of a basic production guide for filming the processes of making, and collaborations with NGOs enabled its translations into local languages. As a free resource, the highly visual guide is thus aiming for maximum reach amongst artisan communities, while the research team continues to explore the disruptive opportunities of digital narratives of craft.