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Consumer empowerment
Edited by Len Tiu Wright
Introduction
Consumer power has become a cliché of modern consumer culture. Marketing practitioners routinely refer to it by pointing to consumers' ability to ignore, resist, and adapt even the sleekest and most costly multi-media assault, invoking such sentiments as "customers are too smart to be fooled" "consumers see through bad marketing" "the customer is king" or "the customer is always right". Maintaining the common-sense notion that the consumer is powerful given his or her ability to exercise free choice ([38] Gabriel and Lang, 1995) is an astute strategy because a free consumer exculpates marketing from charges of seduction, coercion, and manipulation ([85] Ritzer, 1999). Still, a rich tradition of criticising marketing practice and consumer culture as forms of domination exists ([58] Jacobson and Mazur, 1995; [80] Packard, 1957; [87] Rudmin and Richins, 1992). According to this perspective, consumers are helpless against the seductive power of the want-makers ([14] Clark, 1989; [67] Marcuse, 1991; [80] Packard, 1957). While hardly a monolithic body of thought, the critical position generally posits that marketing is a powerful economic, social, and cultural institution designed to control consumers, thus rejecting any real possibility for free choice and consumer agency.
Despite the centrality of power for the evolution, organization, and legitimacy of marketing practice and theory (see [96] Smith, 1987 for a review), marketers still lack a clear understanding of the various intellectual traditions and theoretical origins that inform discussions of consumer power. In comparison to general claims that consumers are empowered by the internet ([84] Pitt et al. , 2002), by increased competition in the marketplace ([71] Moynagh and Worsley, 2002; [74] Nelson, 2002) and by the political implications of consumer choice ([88] Scammel, 2000), the development of conceptual and analytical tools to measure such claims is lacking. This state of affairs is problematic for any research agenda seeking to understand consumer empowerment, because observations linked to whether or not consumers are empowered are irrevocably wedded to the starting definition of power supporting such claims. In most cases these definitions are not clearly detailed and researchers rely on heuristic simplifications and mid-level theories.
As a result, existing writings on consumer power are difficult to compare and reconcile. Hence, a clearly delineated conceptual map of...