Consumer proactive empowerment: A systematic review and taxonomy development

Abstract

While consumer empowerment has been a buzzword in scholarly and managerial circles, the marketing domain lacks a synthesis of consumers’ actions toward realizing, actuating, and enhancing their power. Adopting the gain of power perspective propounded by Bachouche and Sabri (AMS Review 9[3]:304-323, 2019) as a starting point, this study develops a taxonomy of consumer actions that, intentionally or otherwise, lead to their empowerment at the individual and collective levels. In this respect, it incorporates behaviors that represent consumer agency targeted at various actors, e.g., other consumers, firms, markets, policymakers, and the broader social order, rather than the tools or strategies these latter actors deploy to empower consumers. Toward this end, the author systematically identifies and reviews 238 research articles published in diverse disciplines. The referent consumer actions are extracted and structured into four conceptual frames based on relationship, information, participation, and aggregation (Denegri-Knott, J Cust Behav 5(1):82–94, 2006). This study adds to theory by providing a first effort at integrating and classifying the body of knowledge relevant to consumer proactive empowerment, i.e., their pursuit of power in the marketplace. Managers and policymakers stand to gain from the current work by understanding the nature of such acts as well as their volitional and structural determinants.