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10.06.2013 Feature Article

Teaching Consumers to Fish

Teaching Consumers to Fish
10.06.2013 LISTEN

Have consumers been spoonfed to their detriment that anyone would think of teaching them to fish on their own? Spoonfeeding consumers with Consumer rights and responsibilities, consumer protection laws, consumer-business arbitration, small claims courts, consumer associations, consumer organizations, consumer pressure groups, etc, seem to work on the surface but the days of formal movements and bureaucratic resolution of consumer problems are so 1990.

Advanced World Counterfeiting, Global Contamination

Recent problems of melamine contamination in milk damned China until the Netherlands popped up for fake beef products using rat and other disgusting stuff. Unethical business at the highest level requires expensive technology and, thus, the advanced world lurk as prospects with their fingers pointing to the developing world for counterfeiting. Do not the powerful pharmaceutical companies covertly sponsor the counterfeiting of their competitors' products with the objective of undermining them? And are not consumers the world over equally affected?

Necessity, Mother of Consumer Justice
Since the days of Martin Luther King Jr and Ralph Nader, consumers have been spurred on by necessity, and their outbursts have engendered change that was not brought about by organized formal institutions that have been established by governments for the sake of civil and consumer protection. Talk about the Arab spring, London Summer, etc Was it not a consumer problem which triggered the Arab Spring that serially dethroned despots, demagogs and democrats alike?

I call it amoebic consumer reengineering, some call it customer advocacy and even more lately, customer power. The constantly evolving consumer in the digital world has neither shape nor form.

The emergence of the buyer to consumer to customer to client has morphed into another trend all together in this digital age. Consumer Injustice eventually breeds Evolutionary Customer Advocacy, negative as it may be. Love is blind, and so is Consumer Injustice. On March 15, 2013, Consumers International (CI) themed the World Consumer Rights Day on the issue of Consumer Injustice, wherein justice could be churned directly from the injustice, if the consumer microscope is not that maladjusted.

Fishing Businesses in their Own Murky Waters

Some may call it fishing in murky waters. But if the murky waters are unethical business practices then teaching consumers to look for murky waters will almost likely yield results as there's definitely a fish blinded by their own stirring of the waters to make it muddy for others and thereby entrapping themselves in the cloudiness for the unsophisticated consumer-angler to nip them in the bud. If in the business world, entropy rules, in the consumer world amoebic justice rules.

Digital technologies and web sites like Amazon.com and Epinions.com facilitate communication among customers enabling them to share information about their consumer experiences in purchasing and using products and services and even specialized services such as health care.

Consumers are savvier now due to infinite online information search capabilities including the capacity and tools to verify business claims and do comparative shopping.

Social Consumption, Customer Advocacy
Since consumers began to share their consumption on consumer forums and social network platforms, the scales in their eyes began to fall off. Instead of negatively tagging vociferous consumers as tyrannizing the rest, more consumers awoke to the reality of shared problems from common businesses, thereby raising eyebrows on unscrupulous business practices.

Consumer Protection Advocacy usually championed consumer education and product information in labeling as critical in guiding consumers to make well-informed choices. However, since consumers resolved to take the bull by the horns and began to seek their own form of justice through name and shame on social platforms, businesses have been forced to champion consumer-customer education to the extent of even creating platforms for consumers to do comparative shopping vis-à-vis their competitors' products. No consumer advocate, consumer protection organization or pressure group invented this. Necessity did!

Those who can, Teach; those who can't, Act now!

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