Empowerment in Marketing: Synthesis, Critical Review, and Agenda for Future Research: An Abstract

Abstract

The literature on empowerment in marketing has grown exponentially in the 2000s. This article provides a comprehensive review of the concept of consumer empowerment, which in prior research has given rise to a variety of work with sometimes contradictory theoretical frameworks. Consequently, research fragmentation, on the one hand, and the lack of integrative framework uniting all facets of empowerment, on the other hand, justify this research. We carried out a review of more than 600 publications and books in various disciplines. As literature on consumer empowerment is traditionally published on EBSCO, this database was favored, and then we’ve opened our study to other search engines (Elsevier, Web of Science, and Google Scholar).We conducted a research for articles with titles, keywords, or abstracts containing the terms “empowerment” and “consumer.” From this research and identified references, we’ve selected 142 articles that we’ve studied in depth.