Consumer empowerment in the digital era: An exploratory study on the young generations

Marketing literature has already recognized the importance of internet and social media technologies in enhancing consumer empowerment. Blogs, social networking sites, user-generated content sites and countless communities across the web seem to have effectively increased the shift of market power from companies to consumers, enabling people to interact with the world on different levels and to do or to achieve things that they found difficult to do or to achieve before. But despite the general acceptance of the increased empowerment, studies on the theme are still rather fragmented and with few empirical evidence, highlighting the need for additional research in the area. The aim of the present study is therefore to fill this literature gap, examining the sources of empowerment in the digital context and the consumer perceptions of empowerment emerging from the use internet and social media technologies. We concentrate the attention on young consumers, belonging to the millennial generation, for their closer relationship with digital devices. Our discussion highlights different consumer behavior patterns, characterized by different levels of power perceptions and provides evidence to the demand and information power sources, following the theoretical approach of sovereign consumer model, which points out the pivotal role of consumers’ aggregation and information. This contribution presents some valuable research implications, useful for researchers and academics, but also managers and professionals could use this knowledge, in order to build activities for engaging empowered consumers.