Terry Newholm

Consumption as Voting: An Exploration of Consumer Empowerment

Purpose – Increasing numbers of consumers are expressing concerns about reports of questionable corporate practices and are responding through boycotts and buycotts. This paper compares competing theories of consumer empowerment and details findings that examine the applicability of the theory to “ethical consumer” narratives. The nature and impact of consumer empowerment in consumer decision making is then discussed.Design/methodology/approach – The study takes an exploratory approach by conducting semi‐structured in‐depth interviews with a purposive sample of ten consumers. These were recruited from an “ethical product” fair in Scotland.Findings – Results indicate that the participating consumers embraced a voting metaphor, either explicitly or implicitly, to view consumption as an ethical/political domain. Setting their choices within perceived collective consumer behaviour, they characterised their consumption as empowering. This results in an ethical consumer project that can be seen as operating wit...

Assumed empowerment: consuming professional services in the knowledge economy

Purpose – This paper considers the notion of consumer empowerment across the financial, legal and medical service sectors in the UK. Although the advent of the internet is generally seen as potentially enabling consumer empowerment, theoretical papers divide on the question of efficacy. On the one hand, it is argued the much‐vaunted internet opportunity must not be simply taken as evidence of change in the consumer‐producer relationship. On the other the change must not be unquestioningly be taken as advantageous to the consumer.Design/methodology/approach – Empirical data were generated through ten consumer focus groups and eight interviews with professionals.Findings – The paper supports the contention that empowerment is partial and unevenly distributed among consumers. It is argued that characterisations of consumer indifference and producer discipline as preventing effective empowerment are too simplistic. Additionally, any taboo restraining the questioning of professional judgement is largely absent...

Virtual communities come of age: Parallel service, value, and propositions offered in communal online space

Abstract The Internet has opened up new virtual communal spaces for consumers to congregate and address issues of mutual interest. Such virtual communities of interest offer consumers the opportunity to exchange experiential and technical information relating to their shared field of interest. Of the sectors in which virtual communities of interest have emerged, health care has witnessed a proliferation of condition-related communities. Providing health care consumers with the opportunity to share experience and expertise, these communities provide a range of new value propositions offering health care consumers opportunities to undertake self-service activities independent of health care professionals. Utilising the concept of the service encounter as a framework, this paper explores patterns of consumer participation in and utilisation of virtual communities in supporting service consumption. It examines the way in which these permissible spaces act as a virtual parallel service influencing consumer practice in the formal service encounter. For health care consumers and professionals, the utilisation of such space has significant implications for the shape of the service encounter in the information society.

Internet forums and negotiation of healthcare knowledge cultures

Purpose – Internet forums are an important arena for information exchange between consumers. Despite healthcare being one of the most accessed information categories on the internet, knowledge of exchange between patients in online communities remains limited. Specifically, little is known about how patients negotiate knowledge in online forums to understand and manage their diseases. This paper aims to illustrate this by presenting data that demonstrate the construction of tacit knowledge within online health communities, and how consumers exercise their “voice” within complex professional services. Design/methodology/approach – This paper reports an exploratory single case study of an online discussion forum for breast cancer sufferers, in which participants discuss their experience with healthcare services and related pharmaceutical products. Textual data were collected and analysed from the forum retrospectively from an 11-month period, entailing contributions from 252 participants. Findings – The pap...

The digital divide and the theory of optimal slack

The digital divide and exclusion from the knowledge society have become important subjects of government policy. This article compares online communities located in two UK housing estates. Both have relatively high levels of computer literacy but also significant numbers of novices and non-users. It is argued that one estate is achieving a higher level of inclusion because it combines teamwork with optimal levels of organizational slack. Further, this article discusses the optimal conditions for creating an information and communication technology (ICT) learning community and hence contribute to the debate on how best to overcome the digital divide. The possible implications of the findings are explored in terms of policy initiatives.

Transformative Ethical/Sustainable Consumption Research

Ethical and sustainable consumption has burgeoned as a research topic for over four decades, with early work in the 1970s considering the profile and consumption behaviors of the “socially conscious” consumer niche (e.g., Anderson & Cunningham, 1972; Webster, 1975; Brooker, 1976; Mayer, 1976; Scott, 1977). Yet, it can be argued that these decades of research effort have done little to shift the consumption patterns of the mainstream. Overall levels of consumption and the disposable society continue to rise, while market shares of ethical and sustainable products and services remain low (Bray, Johns, & Kilburn, 2011). These consumption trends continue despite the backdrop of climate change, increased visibility of labor practices in developing countries, and global economic crisis. In response to this, we argue that the time to simply describe the phenomenon has passed, and we must now focus our attention on the practical actions that can be taken to bridge this gap. In this special section of the Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing, we draw upon the lens of transformational research that “benefits consumer welfare and quality of life for all beings affected by consumption across the world” (Association for Consumer Research, 2012), to help achieve this and to provide actionable insights for managers and policymakers. Recent literature reveals the divide between the production of academic marketing research and the activities of marketing practitioners (Ankers &

A history for consumption ethics

The histories we give to production and consumption affect our present and future business understandings. We question recent works that have ascribed a relatively short history to consumption ethics. Drawing on writers, across a number of academic disciplines, we conclude evidence exists to make the case against understanding consumption ethics as new to the twenty-first century. We argue that acknowledging a long history for consumption ethics challenges contemporary economic stereotypes of consumers as self-interested maximisers. It also modifies our understanding of the relationship between corporate and consumer social responsibility.

Contradictory spaces: negotiating virtual spaces of consumption

Purpose – The internet driven information revolution is frequently cited as one of the key drivers (re‐)shaping contemporary consumption. In particular, the internet has been seen as disrupting established conventions in professional services. Popularly, it has been viewed as a liberating medium, a mechanism by which consumers and citizens have been able to challenge the authority of the professional establishment. Yet for consumers, the internet can equally be viewed as generating new uncertainties and challenges in terms of negotiating a new settlement with professionals and reconfiguring the service encounter. The purpose of this paper is to explore experiences of consumers with the use of internet derived information in respect of complex professional services and the impact of such information utilisation on the format of the service encounter.Design/methodology/approach – Empirical data is generated through interviews with professionals (n=24) and consumer focus groups (n=10/53).Findings – The paper...

Ethical Aspects of International Product Sourcing

Country-of-origin (CoO) is a central construct in international marketing. It impacts a host of key variables, including ‘product preferences’, ‘willingness-to-buy’ as well as ‘store preferences’. However, in capturing CoO-image, extant research has largely neglected environmental and social aspects. An increasing interest in them calls for a new conceptualization of CoO-image. Our paper addresses this research issue by assessing the impact of environmental and social aspects on above mentioned outcome variables based on representative US/GB samples. We capture these important and hitherto neglected dimensions and provide academics and practitioners with a more comprehensive view of consumers’ responses to imported products.

Surveys Go 3D: Using Virtual Worlds to Innovate in Marketing Research

Consumer engagement with social media technologies accelerates the need for innovative Marketing Research (MR), whilst new media technologies revolutionise MR capabilities in terms of the scope, efficiency, reach and continuity/persistence An emerging and promising area, and the focus of this paper, is the potential impact of 3D Platforms on Marketing Research, in particular, on the core methodology of surveys. 3D Platforms are currently successfully used for a wide range of MR methods (e.g., Catterall and Maclaran 2002). However, whilst surveys remain a popular and important tool in MR as shown by the innovation in 2D online surveys (see Wright 2005); less emphasis has been placed on developing survey methodologies in a 3D context. This is surprising, given that within 3D platforms we are not tied to traditional, often tedious, methods of survey completion. We argue that the development of surveys exploiting the 3D context may address many current criticisms of surveys. Employing novel and engaging methods will stimulate users’ interest and engagement, whilst retaining the advantages of a well-established and useful tool. We ask, how can 3D Platforms help us to innovate in our survey research and what are the rewards and challenges for Marketing Researchers? In addressing this question, we present a prototype 3D survey, describe technical/user challenges and solutions, propose potential pay-offs for research and identify future avenues of development.