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Consumer empowerment model: from unspeakable to undeniable

S. Umit Kucuk
Department of Management, College of Business, Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington, USA
Abstract
Purpose Although consumer sophistication and empowerment is on the rise as a result of the digital revolution, there is insufcient academic exploration with the aim of understanding how this empowerment functions on the internet. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to ll this gap by proposing a new conceptual model in light of available literature. Design/methodology/approach The paper employs a deep and broad literature review and discussion regarding possible consumer power sources on the internet to develop the proposed conceptual model, which is dened as consumer empowerment model (CEM). The components of the model are discussed in detail to reveal possible links, consumer empowerment actualization, and impacts on consumer markets on the internet. Findings The components of CEM are structured in light of the theory of reasoned actions main proposals as follows: Perceived consumer power, Perceived consumer trust, Attitudinal consumer power and nally Behavioral consumer power. Each component is discussed in terms of its possible contributions to the model in order to illustrate how this new form of consumer power actually works. The possible implications of consumer empowerment are also discussed in light of the newly proposed model. Originality/value There is no paper discussing how consumer power actualization works and thus how consumer power revolutionizes todays cyberspaces. In this context, the study is the rst of its kind. Keywords Consumers, Empowerment, Internet, Trust Paper type Conceptual paper

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1. Introduction The idea that the Consumer is King in traditional marketing has a strong consumerist meaning that places the consumer centrally in the companys focus. Although consumers are intuitively presumed to be the most powerful channel members in distribution channel literature, and believed to be protected by the consumerism conceptualization; in reality, companies have historically maintained the most powerful role in markets. In fact, the Consumer is King concept has gone the same way as The Emperor has no clothes with the consumer being nearly powerless in consumer markets in many situations although presumed to be the most powerful. This is not often discussed. In other words, the powerlessness of the consumer has been unspeakable hidden for the sake of company and market growth. However, with the advent of the internet, scholars began discussing the difculties in understanding and controlling todays consumers with traditional marketing approaches and agreed upon the undeniable change that the internet has empowered consumers by providing greater information access and unprecedented communication abilities (Hoffman et al., 2004; Urban et al., 2000; Urban, 2004; Crumlish, 2004; Kucuk and Krishnamurthy, 2007) as also expressed by practitioners as follows:

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There is clearly no turning back, says Dells Mr George. The market will get more fragmented, customers needs will get more diverse, and sophistication and empowerment will continue to grow (Emphasis added) (The Economist, Special report April 2, 2005, p. 16).

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Recently, with the digital revolution, consumers are neither king for the sake of marketing discussions, nor passive market actors who accept the dictated market value without questioning. This historic shift is unprecedented, as indicated by Kucuk and Krishnamurthy (2007, p. 46) as follows:
The industrial revolution was to manufacturers what the digital revolution is to consumers.

Although consumer empowerment is an inuential phenomenon that is transforming todays web 2.0 world, there is no study which aims to understand how consumer empowerment works and functions on the internet. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to discuss changing consumer power with a newly proposed conceptual model, consumer empowerment model (CEM), on the internet. Each component of CEM will be discussed in detail in order to illustrate how this new form of consumer empowerment is actualized. Finally, the study addresses key managerial implications in light of the new proposed model and ongoing discussions. 2. Consumer empowerment model In the developmental stages of e-commerce, scholars realized that the major obstacle for internet technology is the acceptance of the internet as a shopping tool. Thus, major contributions in this eld came from the adaptation of technology acceptance model (TAM) (Davis, 1989) to the internet, which utilizes the theory of reasoned action (TRA) (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975). Issues addressed regarding TAM included the role of trust and risk in the internet technology adoption process (Pavlou, 2003; Pavlou and Fhgensen, 2006), users browsing modes goal oriented or experimental (Sanchez-Franco and Roldan, 2005), web site image (Lee et al., 2006), users cultural differences (Kucuk and Arslan, 2000; Kucuk, 2002), among others. TAM generally uses two specic components: Perceived usefulness the users perception of the degree to which using the system will improve the users benets, and Perceived ease of use the users perception of the amount of effort needed to use the system or related technology (Davis, 1989; Davis et al., 1989; Davis and Venkatesh, 1996). With rising consumer power on the internet, TAM can again be used as a starting point to model the consumer empowerment actualization on the internet. Naturally, power is at the heart of the construct of the empowerment model. In other words, consumers manner of understanding and perceiving the benets (as in TAMs perceived ease of use) gained as a result of using the internet is the main starting point. However, consumers perception of the amount of effort (as in TAMs usefulness) can be associated with consumers trust. When consumers are condent about what they can accomplish on the internet they may feel powerful. In other words, when consumer perceived power is balanced with trust, consumers are likely to believe that they have sufcient power. As a result, consumer trust increases the probability of a consumers willingness to engage the online shopping world, while a lack of consumer trust increases the perceived costs of social exchange and thus might negatively impact consumer power. Therefore, the balance between perceived consumer power and perceived consumer

trust towards a company and its related technologies are important elements of this proposed CEM, as also depicted in Figure 1. The rst condition to reaching consumer empowerment on the internet is having sufcient knowledge, expertise, and ability/capability to perform the necessary operations, which is indicated in Figure 1 Internet technology competence. Without having expertise or the ability to use the internet technology successfully, consumers cannot use the internet as a shopping tool. Once consumers reach a necessary level of competence to implement their decisions on the internet, they then believe/feel that they are capable of executing their decisions on the internet, which is conceptualized in Figure 1 as Economic, social and legal self-efcacies. The concept of self-efcacy indicates that people with high self-efcacy most likely believe that difcult tasks are something to be mastered rather than avoided (Bandura, 1997). Thus, consumers might challenge themselves to overcome difculties and are empowered by their belief in their own self-efcacy (Macdonald and Uncles, 2007) in different forms (social, economic and legal self-efcacies) on the internet. Economic self-efcacy, in this context, indicates that consumers with high economic self-efcacy can engage and understand price and value related activities when they are searching for needed products. Similarly, in the social context, a lack of self-efcacy might render social interactions difcult to manage. Thus, social self-efcacy indicates a consumers condence in his or her ability to successfully communicate with fellow consumers to reach common goals within societies. This concept is easily applied to the legal eld. A person with high self-efcacy is more likely to navigate the web to nd legal solutions, as conceptualized in Figure 1. These types of consumers are empowered by their self-efcacy, and are thus willing to accept the challenge of the internet. As a result of such self-efcacy, consumers can see themselves as powerful market actors or can master difcult market relations and situations.
Internet technology competence H1aa Economic self-efficacy H1ab H1ba Social self-efficacy H1bb H1ca Legal self-efficacy H1cb

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Perceived consumer power H2 Perceived consumer trust H3 Trust in website H3a Trust in online company

H4

Attitudinal consumer power

H6

Behavioral consumer power

H5

H3b

Figure 1. Consumer empowerment model

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The empowerment process ows from perception to the attitudinal consumer empowerment stage. This is similar to TRA hypotheses (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975). Therefore, if attitudinal empowerment reaches high levels with more usage and positive experience, behavioral power outcomes can be observed as consumer consumption reinforcement promoting products to fellow like-minded consumers, or alternatively, complaining about and protesting them. 3. Perceived consumer power Power in marketing theory has been predominantly discussed within the distribution channels behavioral (El-Ansary and Stern, 1972; Gaski and Nevin, 1985) and economic systems (Ailawadi et al., 1995; Betancourt and Gautschi, 1998). In either system, power is basically discussed from the perspective of the degree to which a channel member can control or inuence the outcomes of others (El-Ansary and Stern, 1972) or the interdependence between members (Dwyer et al., 1987; Heide, 1994; Lusch and Brown, 1996). In the end, it was presumed that all distribution channel members are dependent upon consumer purchase decisions, and consumers were perceived as the most valuable and powerful members of the channel. However, consumers, in actuality, can only show passive power by just hoping to obtain a better value or protesting by zapping TV ads, tearing up promotions, or passively boycotting and not buying specic products. Thus, consumers neither felt empowered, nor did they have any empowering environments in markets (Harrison et al., 2006). However, with the internet, todays consumers feel less dependent upon companies, and thus have more freedom (Jordan, 1999; Wolnbarger and Gilly, 2001) and control (Wolnbarger and Gilly, 2001; Kucuk and Krishnamurthy, 2007) over their transactions and relationships with companies. Now, consumers can be anywhere (and anyone) at any time on the internet as conceptualized as superior exibility (Thompson, 2003). Consumers can communicate with like-minded consumers on the same footing with corporations (Kucuk, 2008a; Krishnamurthy and Kucuk, 2008), thus reaching speech equalization on the internet (Wu, 1999) as a result of the internets decentralized and anti-hierarchical information architecture (Jordan, 1999). Such developments increase consumer exit options from market, dened as exit-based consumer power, and encourage widespread usage of consumer voice, dened as voice-based consumer power, on the internet (Kucuk, 2008b). In this context, there has been no platform or technology that equalized the power balance between consumers and companies in the history of business, as the internet has done today (Kucuk and Krishnamurthy, 2007). 3.1 Internet technology competence Internet technology competence refers to consumers skills and understanding of the technology necessary to operate and navigate on the internet. Thus, this indicates the degree of consumers control over the outcomes of their usage of the internet for a specic task. A lack of technological competence in many marginalized sub-cultures and nations have plunged many would be internet consumers into the digital darkness, as discussed in digital divide (DD) literature (DiMaggio and Hargittai, 2001; Mehra et al., 2004). This divide can be broader between generations (young and older users) in terms of internet technology competence as conceptualized second-level of digital divide (Hargittai, 2002).

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Generally, consumers perception of usefulness and ease of use of the internet, which are broadly studied by structuring upon main TAM (Davis, 1989), can eliminate barriers to consumers technology competence and can mitigate the effects of DD (Porter and Donthu, 2006). The greater the consumers internet technology competency, the better their chance of asserting their own control in market relationships and seeing themselves as active and inuential market players on the internet. Therefore, internet technology competency is the rst condition for consumers to truly comprehend their power through economic, social and legal self-efcacies on the internet, as also hypothesized as follows: H1aa. Consumer internet technology competence positively inuences consumer economic self-efcacy. H1ba. Consumer internet technology competence positively inuences consumer social self-efcacy. H1ca. Consumer internet technology competence positively inuences consumer legal self-efcacy. 3.2 Economic self-efcacy The internet reduced market imperfections and stimulated competition, and has become a powerful economic equalizer for markets and consumers (Grover and Ramanlal, 1999). Such increasing competition in online markets in turn reduces the power of monopolies and accelerates the markets economic liberation and effectiveness (ORourke, 2000; Brynjolfsson et al., 2003; Huang, 2005). Now, there are more products, product information and price options on the internet where possible buyers and sellers can meet at with little or no cost (ORourke, 2000). Thus, the internet enhances consumers bargaining and economic power (Campbell et al., 2005). However, such economic empowerment loses its impact unless consumers are capable of accurately evaluating product and market related value elements by optimizing the information introduced on the internet. This, in turn, is dened as economic self-efcacy in the context of this study: consumers belief and condence in their ability to successfully insert themselves into a better economic situation in a shopping process on the internet. In other words, consumers with high economic self-efcacy are better able to nd the desired item at a better value (from a variety of sources) in order to maximize their economic benets in a simple shopping process on the internet. This view extends the denition of economic self-efcacy in the literature. In this context, although, the literature has generally dened economic self-efcacy as consumers condence in their coping abilities with general economic factors that directly affect the consumers nancial situation (Engelberg, 2006), this study seeks to extend this concept to the micro level in a simple shopping process. In this context, a consumers attitude toward money is generally related his or her coping abilities through understanding sensible money management (Wernimont and Fitzpatrick, 1972; Bailey and Lown, 1993), or thus understanding the value accurately in any exchange relationship. These kinds of consumers are generally dened as utilitarian, rationale, or goal-directed consumers who are generally less involved in experimental, fun or impulsive shopping behaviors on the internet (Wolnbarger and Gilly, 2001). Such consumers do pre-planned shopping and search product and price information before buying by utilizing the internets aforementioned economic benets to get the

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best value in online markets. Thus, they experience more control, freedom and empowerment in an online shopping process (Wolnbarger and Gilly, 2001). As a result, consumers economic self-efcacy is an important psychological factor that can be linked to consumers capabilities to search and nd better economic value and benets from a variety of shopping sources provided on the internet, making these consumers perceive themselves to be more empowered and in control of their shopping processes on the internet, as also hypothesized as follows: H1ab. Consumer economic self-efcacy positively inuences perceived consumer power. 3.3 Social self-efcacy Social self-efcacy can be dened as an individual consumers condence in his/her abilities to build social relationships, and to easily communicate with and organize other like-minded consumers to better serve the groups values and goals. In other words, consumers with high social self-efcacy have the ability to communicate with others and to organize people for the benet of the group or society. In the past, it was easy for consumers to feel alienated in marketplace (Allison, 1978), and thus to feel helpless and powerless. However, consumers who feel alienated can now easily connect with online communities and discussion groups to share their experiences and ideas with the other consumers (Hagel and Armstrong, 1997). They also have a platform from which to organize people (Crumlish, 2004), which heightens market pressures. Consumers can communicate easily with each other in order to create solutions among themselves, which can put sufcient pressure on a company to encourage it to change its business practices. Because the number of consumers far outweighs (Huang, 2005) the number of distribution channel members, consumers have a distinct advantage in their ability to change public opinion and thus have an enormous amount of purchasing (Gronmo and Olander, 1991) and hence collective bargaining power (Kauffman and Wang, 2001) when they are organized. In this context, consumer-organized anti-brand sites have strong potential to impact consumer consumption habits by creating new brand meanings, identities, values, solutions, and thus re-shaping companies marketing strategies (Kucuk, 2008a; Krishnamurthy and Kucuk, 2008). Now, company-generated marketing messages are losing inuence and ground to online communities and forums (Bickart and Schindler, 2001). In fact, companies have even attempted to hire consumer bloggers who have demonstrated high social self-efcacy and who have had an inuence on groups of consumers (Armstrong, 2006). As a result, consumers who have high social self-efcacy are gaining more social support and power on the internet, as also hypothesized as follows: H1bb. Consumer social self-efcacy positively inuences perceived consumer power. 3.4 Legal self-efcacy Legal self-efcacy can be dened as consumer condence in their ability to successfully reach legal information and protect their own rights as consumers on the internet. Recently, individual consumers can easily access legal information about corporations. Information that was previously limited to lawyers or high level employees on Wall Street is accessible and easily located on the internet (Kucuk and

Krishnamurthy, 2007). A savvy consumer can locate pending lawsuits, settlement agreements, as well as corporate lings with governmental regulatory commissions. A consumer is not limited to information about a companys legal woes within the USA, but rather now has access to information about international violations as well. Access to such information can allow for the coordination of lawsuits against targeted brands. In a less formal way, this free ow of information also enables consumers to share complaints on their own web sites with other like-minded consumers (Krishnamurthy and Kucuk, 2008). In the USA, such expression is generally protected by the rst amendment right to free speech (Kucuk, 2008a, b). Consumers who use the internet have become much more aware of the privacy concerns that may await them on the web. As a result of their outcry (often resulting in mass publication of consumer privacy violations via online communities, individual web sites, and blogs), and with the help of third-party watch dog groups, companies now may think twice before accessing a consumers personal information without permission (Cavoukian and Hamilton, 2002). Governmental regulation has played a role in protecting the consumer as well. It is illegal for a company to sell consumer information gained from the internet to third parties without the consumers consent, though the same sale of information remains legal for information gathered via other means, such as catalog sales (Kucuk and Krishnamurthy, 2007). Thus, consumers with high legal self-efcacy will engage more on legal issues to create a powerful front to companies on the internet as also hypothesized as follows: H1cb. Consumer legal self-efcacy positively inuences perceived consumer power. 4. Consumer trust in the internet Although there are various perspectives and approaches in the conceptualization of trust in different disciplines, trust can be conceptualized in the context of this study in terms of uncertainty and interdependence. Uncertainty about the intentions of others is a perceived source of risk and increases the need for trust (Luhmann, 1979; Fukuyama, 1995; Rousseau et al., 1998; Gefen, 2000; Harrison et al., 2006). Often times, the reason behind uncertainty is the lack of knowledge or information asymmetry about possible risk factors. As Lewis and Weigert (1985, p. 462) succinctly state, Trust begins where knowledge ends. Similarly, Luhmann (1979) denes trust as an uncertainty reducer which can be reached by complementary forms of power, or control. Although uncertainty reduction can be reached via an increase in information, more information in the meantime may cause complexity (Huffman and Kahn, 1998). Another necessary condition for trust is each partys level of interdependence. When there is strong interdependence and reliance, then there is less risk and more trust exists on each side (Fukuyama, 1995; Rousseau et al., 1998; Gefen, 2000). Luo (2002) indicated that the key factor inuencing these types of trust is the consumers satisfaction with previous interactions and experience with the online company. In this respect, trust is dened by Rousseau et al. (1998, p. 395) as follows:
Trust is not a control mechanism but a substitute for control, reecting a positive attitude about anothers motives. Control comes into play only when adequate trust is not present (Emphasis added).

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Control, in this context, is one of the major components of power as also conceptualized earlier. Similarly, Cowcher (2001, p. 11) sees trust as:
[. . .] an imperfect substitute for absent power over the agents to whom we stand in a vulnerable position, as well as for missing information about their intentions and deeds. (Emphasis added).

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Thus, in an ordinary relationship, because the less powerful side is more dependent on the more powerful sides outcomes, the powerful side generally needs to build trust (Hart and Saunders, 1997). In this context, consumer distrust can alternatively be considered a source of power for the consumer (Ekici, 2007). In other words, when consumers feel powerless, trustworthy relationships with companies are impossible. The negative relationship between power and trust is depicted in terms of their functions of control and interdependence in Figure 2. If consumer control and inuence is high, and the consumer is less dependent on the company, the consumer is likely to be empowered, as also indicated at point A in Figure 2. On the other hand, if the consumer feels highly dependent on the company and has less control and inuence on the company, there is need for trust as also indicated point B in Figure 2. Point C indicates the optimum level power and trust required between the consumer and company to reach a balanced and benecial market relationship. In other words, a maximized consumer power-trust relationship can be reached anywhere along the OD line in Figure 2. Therefore, the relationship between consumer power and trust on the internet can be hypothesized in the context of the studys proposed model as follows: H2. Perceived consumer trust inuences perceived consumer power on the internet. In light of TAM, perceived consumer trust also directly inuences consumer attitudinal power, as also hypothesized as follows: H5. Perceived consumer trust positively inuences consumer attitudinal power on the internet.

A Consumer control over company

Figure 2. The relationship between consumer power and trust

Consumer interdependence with company

As a result, understanding the manner in which consumers interpret their power will be helpful in gaining insight into when and why a consumer might feel safe enough to engage in online buying or protests. Thus, perceived consumer trust will be investigated in two parts in the following section: consumer trust in companys web site and trust in online company. Although trust has been broadly and deeply studied by social scientists, to the best of our knowledge there is no study investigating the differences in these two aforementioned distinct trust perspectives on the internet. 4.1 Trust in web site Although consumers may have faith in a company, the companys web site might not provide and establish trustable relationships. In this context, consumer trust in web sites is mainly discussed in web site quality studies to describe consumers feeling toward the web sites trustworthiness (Loiacono et al., 2002), technical adequacy (Aladwani and Palvia, 2002), interaction reliability, personalization (Barnes and Vidgen, 2001), system use security of transaction (Liu and Arnett, 2000; Kim and Stoel, 2004), and nally security of personal information (Ranganathan and Ganapathy, 2002; Kim and Stoel, 2004). Web sites with a crowded format and ashing banner ads might fail to create trust (Urban et al., 2000), but rather cause banner ad blindness and consumer dissatisfaction. Generally, trust in a web site can be discussed as the web sites ability to provide secure transactions and strong privacy policies (Urban et al., 2000; Loiacono et al., 2002; Aladwani and Palvia, 2002; Kim and Stoel, 2004). It is also useful to provide assurances from a trustable third party such as TRUSTe and BBB seals of privacy, process, and technology assurances, thus security (Urban et al., 2000; Kimery and McCord, 2002; Miyazaki and Krishnamurthy, 2002). In addition, it is important to provide unbiased, up-to-date information about product/service specication, prices, in-stock availability, and comparative information including competitors (Urban et al., 2000). Consumer trust in web site studies predominantly focuses on transaction security and privacy issues, which have been identied as important consumer power sources on the internet (Kucuk and Krishnamurthy, 2007). H3b. Consumer trust in a companys web site positively inuences perceived consumer trust in the internet. 4.2 Trust in online company Trust in an online company can be discussed as the companys ability to reduce the perceived uncertainty and to keep promises and commitments on the internet. Generally, the following factors enhance a consumers trust in a company: a companys willingness and ability to protect consumers rights; to answer consumer inquiries appropriately; to introduce unbiased and updated product/service information, and help consumers to make conscious product/service choices; to provide delivery and fair return guarantees; and nally to provide the companys ethical codes without using confusing terms (Hoffman et al., 1999; Peeples, 2002). Consumer trust on the internet has been discussed as one of the main factors inuencing consumer participation in online shopping, and is studied by scholars with different academic focuses, such as: trust and technology acceptance (Gefen et al., 2003); social presence (Gefen and Straub, 2004); familiarity (Gefen, 2000); and trustworthiness-beliefs (Gefen, 2002). Although trust in company was studied from

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varying perspectives, there is no study exploring consumer trust in a company in terms of consumer power on the internet. H3a. Perceived consumer trust in an online company positively inuences trust in the companys web site.

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5. Attitudinal consumer power Attitude can be considered a persons evaluation of action (Bagozzi et al., 1992). Thus, once a consumers perception about his/her power and trust in an online company/web site is strong, an increased demonstration of consumer power can be expected in light of TRA hypotheses. This inclination can be easier for action-oriented (Kuhl, 1982; Bagozzi et al., 1992) and highly self-condent consumers (Dash et al., 1976; Locander and Hermann, 1979; Sharma et al., 1983). Such consumers may perceive less uncertainty and risk, and may feel more empowered as opposed to their state-oriented and low condence counterparts. Therefore, this can also be hypothesized in light of the aforementioned discussions as follows: H6. Consumers who have positive attitudes toward their empowerment are more likely to transform their attitude into behavior, or thus behavioral power, on the internet. 6. Behavioral consumer power Once consumer attitudes toward their own empowerment on the internet reach high levels, consumers can act. This action can be in favor of a company by sharing their recommendations with fellow like-minded consumers (Godes et al., 2005; Henig-Thurau and Walsh, 2003) or against a company by protesting the companys products/services/policies on the internet (Harrison-Walker, 2001; Bickart and Schindler, 2001; Vegh, 2003; Kucuk, 2008a; Krishnamurthy and Kucuk, 2008). Notably, online forums either consumer-oriented or consumer-generated may be more likely to generate empathy among fellow consumers, and develop more product category interest from online discussions forums than they would if they were exposed only to marketer-generated sources of information online (Bickart and Schindler, 2001; Kucuk, 2008a; Krishnamurthy and Kucuk, 2008). This, in turn, indicates the success of the consumerist oriented approach, which places consumers in charge and allows them to function as co-partner or co-worker in company operations (Oliver, 2006). Recently, many consumer forums are rivaling corporate web sites, thus the marketing empowerment battle rises between consumer-generated word of mouth power and marketer-generated content power. Taken to extremes, consumers now can voice their dissatisfaction rmly on their own blogs and web sites, with the intention of redirecting consumer consumption patterns. More advanced internet-based actions offer a more proactive and aggressive use of the internet and cover a wider range of boycott and protest, or hacktivist, techniques such as cyberattacks, web site defacements, virtual sit-ins, and massive e-mail campaigns (e-mail bombs) (Vegh, 2003). Thus, now companies can feel the effects consumer power in real time while it used to take days or years (Gelb, 1995). As a result, the more consumers become aware of their power, the more boycotts, activism and consumer involvement might be observed and expected on the internet.

This actually, in turn, indicates the transformation of silent majorities into verbal consumer societies with the advent of the internet. 7. Conclusion The theory suffers a lack of second generation models that replicate consumer empowerment and behaviors in todays transforming web 2.0 environments. Therefore, in this study, a conceptual model CEM is introduced and its components are discussed in detail in light of the related theories. Understanding all dimensions of consumer empowerment might transform traditional company perspectives which view consumers as passive buyers or service receivers, rather than as company partners and active market agent or, alternatively, as service providers. Empowerment eventually can draw consumers attention to company web sites. Empowering consumers with convenient, exible, and easy to navigate web features to build their own space, as in the case of user-generated content, can be considered an important empowerment tool that companies can provide. Other empowering web site features can include: nding and providing better value by scanning the markets to increase consumers comparative options as in the case of search engines and shopping bots; and providing decision support systems by connecting consumers with like-minded fellow consumers and communities as in the case of many social networking and online brand communities. In this way, such tools can be used to manage consumer perceptions, and attitudes about their own power. In short, the more consumers are empowered on the internet, the more time and money they will spend on specic web sites and digital spaces. The companies who understand the role of the empowerment process, and provide the necessary empowerment tools to consumers supported by trustworthy company and web site interactions, are sitting at the heart of web 2.0 transformation on the web, and thus will succeed. Trust, in this studys context, is also dened as the reducer of confusion and uncertainty in interactions with consumers; while power, on the other hand, is more of a control-oriented phenomenon. Generally, in order to develop trust, a consumer need only receive a few simple things: the guarantee of the seller to fulll the consumers expectations prior to buying and the delivery of the product in the manner promised. This guarantee or promise works to reduce uncertainty for the buyer, and following through with the promise is sure to reduce disappointment. Thus, when consumers feel uncertain and hesitant, empowering them with trust tools (commitments, guarantees, promises, etc.) helps them to enhance their self-efcacy to create solutions for themselves and even for companies. In this context, trust balances the power between consumers and online companies, thus empowering them in the digital markets. As a result, companies who are shifting/sharing their power with consumers can gain more trust for long lasting business relationships on the internet. However, too much consumer or company power can lead to destructive outcomes, and careful power and trust optimization, and hence management, is necessary to reach well functioning markets and consumer-company relationships. Thus, this newly proposed CEM has strong potential to shed light on many missing links in terms of consumer empowerment and behaviors on the internet to develop key marketing and public policy solutions in this continuously evolving digital environment.

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Finally, the model also needs to be tested empirically to observe major deviations from theoretical discussions in order to reach a robust model infrastructure that reveals the paths to transforming consumer power for the benet of all in tomorrows digital markets.
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