ABSTRACT
Groundswell (Li & Bernoff, 2008). Here Comes Everybody (Shirky, 2008). Join the Conversation (Jaffe, 2007). Six Pixels of Separation (Joel, 2009). Trust Agents (Brogan & Smith, 2009). The New Community Rules (Weinberg, 2009). Socialnomics (Qualman, 2009). The titles of the latest popular business books about marketing leave little doubt that business has recognized the influence of social media. The book titles hint at a tipping point where the social communications of consumers speaking to other consumers online lead to important social and economic outcomes, which marketers and managers are already partaking in and from which many of them are profiting. Just as with Transformative Consumer Research (TCR), the same underlying principles that enable marketers to influence consumers to bond with and buy brands can also be used to further consumer empowerment and well-being. In fact, from the time of some of the earlier theorization about the links between social media and marketing (e.g., Kozinets, 1999; Levine et al., 2000), consumer empowerment—and, explicitly, a moral empowerment—has been hailed as a hallmark of the medium:
Empowered by information exchange and emboldened by relational interactions, consumers will use their online activities to actively judge consumption offerings, and increasingly resist what they see as misdirected…. The existence of united groups of online consumers implies that power is shifting away from marketers and flowing to consumers. For while consumers are increasingly saying yes to the Internet, to electronic commerce and to online marketing efforts of many kinds, they are also using the medium to say “no” to forms of marketing they find invasive or unethical. Virtual communities are becoming important arenas for organizing consumer resistance [and] have been used for “transformational” interaction aimed at increasing the betterment of the group of consumers as a community, very often by undermining the efforts of those who would profit at their expense. (Kozinets, 1999, p. 258)
