“소비자 - 기업 협력”에 대한 탐색적 연구: 소비자 참여 마케팅 활동 사례의 비판적 고찰

Abstract

The concept of Consumer-Business Collaboration is gaining importance in information society in which the notion of coexistence is critical. Several reasons could be behind the shift in paradigm from that of competition to that of collaboration between consumers and businesses. First driving force of such change can be found on consumer side. In the information age, consumers could access information that were not available to them before and they are able to modify, produce and share information with other consumers, and such informed consumers become empowered in the market. From business perspective, collaboration is essential element in business success and sustainability. Businesses began collaborating with odd partners such as competitors, stakeholders and labor union. In order to succeed and cope with fast changing market conditions, it is important for businesses to form partnership with consumers and feel the needs of consumers and respond to them in an appropriate and timely manner. Consumer-Business Collaboration is useful not only to businesses but also to consumers in the sense it ultimately contributes to the realization of consumer sovereignty in the market. More specifically, where as the concept of dollar vote, a traditionally discussed means of realizing consumer sovereignty, has been criticized as being a remedial approach to what is already offered in the market, the potential of Consumer-Business Collaboration lies in the possibility that consumers’ needs and preferences can be communicated to businesses before the actual production happens, and thus making the distribution of social resources more ideal and effective by consumers. A common movement in marketing activities that are prevailing lately is using consumer participation as means of marketing, and claims have been made that such activities are examples of Consumer-Business Collaboration. The basic idea behind such marketing activity is to allow or to encourage consumers to participate in the process of marketing by providing input into business activities. However, those activities are yet to be critically examined from consumers’ perspective to ensure that they truly represent Consumer-Business Collaboration, and provide benefits to consumers, as well as to businesses. The purpose of this study is two folds: 1) to provide an overview of the concept of Consumer- Business Collaboration, and to identify the necessary conditions for its success, and 2) to critically review the business practice of consumer participation marketing and analyze whether or not such practices fall short of the idea of Consumer-Business Collaboration. The framework for analysing consumer participation marketing activities and their qualification as Consumer-Business Collaboration was based on Prahalad and Ramaswamy(2004)’s DART (Dialogue-Access-Risk Benefits-Transparency) Model. While the model provides wonderful insights with regards to factors necessary in Consumer-Business Collaboration, since the proposed DART model was conceptual, this study also reviewed empirical analysis that looked at business cooperations and adopted the essential conditions of business cooperations and extended those conditions to Consumer-Business Collaboration context. Final framework for analysis is composed as follows. First, “Dialogue” examined the value creation that is useful to consumer and business directly, durability of relations, participation initiative, opening of important result of collaboration, and two-way interaction(communication). Second, “Access” examined the possibility of always being able to approach partners and whether or not an open channel of communication existed. Third, “Risk-Benefit” examined whether there is a process to identify and choose the partners with the necessary qualifications, and protection of partner’s private information. Lastly, “Transparency” examined the sharing the collaboration benefit. Using this framework, common consumer marketing activities that are popular in Korean context such as Idea contest, Consumer monitor groups, Product experience group managed by businesses and the phenomena of Power blogger were analyzed. The major findings of the study are as follows: First, evaluating the ‘Dialogue’ dimension, while the actitivities analyzed had some component of consumers’ voluntary participation, the nature of volunteering is very much limited in the sense that most activities are originally initiated by businesses and only a small fraction of consumers participate. Participation should be made on the common understanding of the purpose of collaboration, which needs to be strengthened for a more successful consumer-business collaboration. Also although all activities analyzed incorporate communications of some sort between consumers and businesses, the quality of such communication was found to be quite limited in the sense that it was only one-way or there was no way for consumers to initiate the conversation. Evaluating from ‘Access’ dimension, consumer monitoring activities and activities of power bloggers showed the highest level of openness and consistency. Due to the development of IT, it seemed that establishing an open and consistent communication channel was fairly common and easy, but maintaining the channel open is a difficult job, for which more effective strategies should be researched. Analyses also showed that the amount and the quality of information given to consumers were highest for consumer monitoring activities. The analyses showed that businesses also can gather the most beneficial information from consumers through consumer monitoring activities, showing that the more risk, the more gain. In terms of sharing benefits, it is our discovery that the boundary of benefits that need to be shared among consumers and business should be more finely defined, in the sense that if the benefit is too narrowly defined, consumers who participate may be reduced to the status of employee of business that are hired on need base, and inappropriately paid. Among the four marketing activities that are done through consumer participation, consumer monitoring activities was identified as the most desirable form of Consumer-Business collaboration. While such activities thus far had been commonly initiated by business, consumer could initiate such activity by using consumer community or personal blogs. We have following suggestions for improving Consumer-Business collaboration. It is necessary 1) to clearly define what constitutes of rewards of collaboration on both parties, 2) set up a transparent system that distributes the gains from the collaboration to both consumers and businesses, 3) to find a mechanism that builds trust between consumer and business and 4) to clearly define what the values of such collaboration is. By making improvements in these aspect, Consumer-Business collaboration that is sustainable and mutually beneficial can be established, and maintained.