The effect of choice on consumer empowerment

Alan Mitchell recently wrote a great piece in Marketing (UK marketing magazine) on the use of customer empowerment as a marketing tool.

Now we’ve all got very caught up in 2008 and 2009 about the explosion of social media and how that has turned the marketer-customer relationship on its head. Social media has essentially turned low-impact, low-reach word of mouth into high-impact, high-reach communication. It’s taken conversations between limited physical social circles and lifted them onto virtual but global social media platforms, with much greater opportunities – and threats – to brands.

However, what’s been lost in our love affair with social media, is that consumer choice, and the consumer’s role in using those choices, is the true driver of consumer empowerment. In truth, social media is a platform for conversation around brands and in the modern sense, the focal point of consumer empowerment, but choice is the driver. If there was little or no brand choice (such as existed in the closed apartheid brand environment in the 80′s in South Africa), there would be no empowerment.

As consumers gained more information from more sources and greater access to competitive product options within categories, they made more informed purchases, and were more vocal about making brand choices based on both a demand for greater satisfaction and for the non-tangible communication that brand purchases attached to them. It’s important to note that I’m not referring to social media here; the antecedents can be found in the media proliferation of the late 80′s and 90′s, the explosion of brand choices in product categories over the 90′s and the (terribly-phrased but what else can we call them) Noughties, and the general comparative product information and testimonials available on the internet in the pre-social media online environment.

Greater access to product information in conjunction with wider brand choices, allowed consumers to both express themselves more and demand more from their product purchases. This, along with the frustration with a daily bombardment of broadcast advertising messages, led to greater and more vocal challenging of the fact and fiction of marketing messages and thus, increased ownership of brand choice. Empowerment, through choice.

Anyway, that’s a digression from Mitchell’s timely op-ed piece. He asserts that consumer empowerment in this modern social media world is based on choice, voice, the ability to specify needs and wants, and the control over what he calls ‘choice architecture’:

“The first level is choice. The classic arena of choice is between competing products and services. More recently, however, consumers have also gained much greater choice over the sources of information they pay attention to. This has huge implications for marketing communications.

The second level is voice. Consumers’ ability to use online social media to publicly express their views and feelings is a hot topic. Viral messages have far-reaching implications for reputation management. As Bond noted: ‘Within seconds, customers can compare notes, demolish price structures, destroy marketing strategies and tell the world to shop elsewhere.’ If, that is, there is a genuine ‘elsewhere’.

Another layer of voice, with even bigger implications, is consumers’ ability to volunteer information about themselves: who they are; what they want; what they want to find out about; what their changing life circumstances and goals are. Volunteered personal information could, literally, turn many aspects of marketing upside-down – into a process driven not by marketers, but by consumers.

A third level of empowerment is the ability to specify what I want, how and when. This is more about empowering processes rather than choice or voice.

A fourth level of empowerment is control over ‘choice architectures’ – the ways in which our choices are constructed, framed and presented in the first place.

This really does put the cat among the marketing pigeons. A menu in a restaurant is an example of a choice architecture. Yes, the menu ‘empowers’ diners via choice, but the restaurant-owner retains power as the ‘choice architect’, selecting what choices his customers are presented with.”

We are experiencing a radical shift in the marketing environment and more particularly, in the marketer-consumer relationship. This shift has yet to complete its course and there will undoubtedly be further changes to the marketing mindset as consumers begin to realise the potential power that they hold. One would argue that is not yet the case, where consumers are becoming more vocal and finding their feet in this new ‘empowered’ environment, but there hasn’t been the collective harnessing of this power over brands as yet.

It’s going to be a really wild ride, but brands have to understand their role in the process and work with their customers to ascertain the right level of empowerment that is right for the brand. Too little, and consumers will make other choices; too much, and the brand will cease to have an identity.