Research On The Consumer Empowerment From Consumer Perception Perspective

In the 1960 of the 20th century, the field of Sociology began to appear empowerment concept. At first, research on the empowerment is concerned about the vulnerable groups in society, however, with the deepening of the study, which began to expand into marketing field. Marketing scholars generally agreed that, in the entire market, consumers are vulnerable groups, thus consumers need empowerment. Especially with the development of the free market and the rise of Western liberalism, competition among companies became more and more intense, thus consumers’ right to choose has become bigger and bigger. Meanwhile, with the popularization of the Internet, online shopping development has improved consumers’ power significantly.A growing number of scholars began to study consumers’ online shopping behavior, as well as the factors affecting the online buying. However, these studies have ignored an important problem, that is how the empowerment of consumers and the consumers’ perception of power affected consumer’s empowerment behavior. Fierce competition in the free market has made companies do their best to meet the needs of consumers, that in order to enable the consumer to "vote" (use money to purchase their product), so that companies have to give in to the empowerment of consumers. Some scholars have explored the concept of consumer empowerment, they approve that social environment and economic development have changed consumers’ view of power, but most of them ignored the consumer’s own power perception, and rarely from the consumers’ perception perspective to study. Therefore, in the basic of Consumer Empowerment Model (CEM) which was proposed by S· Umit Kucuk, this paper made a further study to validate it.Based on online shopping context, through the analysis of the existing literature on empowerment, consumer power, empowerment and consumers’empowerment, combined with the Theory of Rational Behavior (TRA) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this paper analyzed the role of trust in consumer empowerment process, expressed the empowerment process from consumer perception perspective. Based on the consumers’ perceived power, perceived trust, attitudinal consumer empowerment, behavioral consumer empowerment for variables, combined with existing model, according to realities, this paper proposed five hypotheses. And through questionnaire design, the instancing of questionnaires to obtain data, and using SPSS 19.0 software to data analysis, the following results are presented:(1) under the network environment, consumer perceived trust has a significant positive effect on consumer perceived power; (2) under the network environment, consumer perceived power has a significant positive effect on attitudinal consumer empowerment; (3) under the network environment, consumer perceived trust has a significant positive effect on attitudinal consumer empowerment; (4) under the network environment, consumer perceived power played an partial intermediary role among consumer perceived trust and attitudinal consumer empowerment; (5) under the network environment, attitudinal consumer empowerment has a significant positive effect on behavioral consumer empowerment.In response to these results, we made two recommendations:(1) companies on the internet have to enhance their reputation to gain the trust of consumers, (2) companies on the internet have to public factual information to avoid negative attitude of consumer’s power. Finally, according to the study, this paper arguing that future studies should taking into account different backgrounds, extensions, variable dimensions to include more variables or expanse study samples.