Frustrated Consumers and the Power of the Web: How customers activism may turn into firms’ involvement of “empowered working consumers"

How can unsatisfied consumers mobilize to gain attention and obtain the “desired offer” from a firm? How the questioned firm may react to these demanding consumers? We develop answers to these questions drawing on a qualitative analysis of a few selected web based fans’ communities. Our analysis relies on the consumer power and working consumer theoretical perspectives, with the aim to examine the effect of web based communities on consumer empowerment and to propose a conceptual framework useful to describe the interaction process between empowered consumers and firms. Our discussion highlights different patterns of interactions between frustrated, agentic consumers, organized in communities, and firms. We conclude by illustrating how firms, forced to deal with this new countervailing power, may benefit from the engagement of empowered consumers, either by interacting on actual co-creation projects or by co-opting them and exploiting their creative force in order to regain control over the market.