Consumer Voice: The Democratization of Consumption Markets in the Digital Age [1st ed.] 9783030539825, 9783030539832

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Consumer Voice The Democratization of Consumption Markets in the Digital Age S. Umit Kucuk

Consumer Voice

S. Umit Kucuk

Consumer Voice The Democratization of Consumption Markets in the Digital Age

S. Umit Kucuk University of Washington Tacoma, WA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-53982-5 ISBN 978-3-030-53983-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53983-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my Es.ref

Introduction

Consumer voice is indispensable part of any marketing mechanism. Any marketing organization does not understand and appreciate consumer voice is blind and deaf and cannot see their future. Similarly, any society does not appreciate the value of consumer voice will be dragged into unconscious and meaningless consumption patterns and social value systems that are far from satisfying consumers as a market agent and civic member. Thus, I do not know if these pages will be enough to emphasize and emphasize the importance of consumer voice from both marketing and societal point of views. Although its theoretical and practical importance, the concept rather has been neglected for a long time until recently. There is a slowly growing trend in academic publication on consumer voice. Yet, there are not enough conceptualizations that discuss the importance of consumer voice in a more comprehensible and unifying manner under one theoretical perspective. Thus, this book is an attempt to fill this theoretical gap so that we can build a sound theoretical infrastructure for consumer voice theory. The book first discusses the meaning of “voice” from interdisciplinary perspective and then focuses on consumer voice. The consumer voice and its historic evolution are defined and discussed from both marketing and consumer behavior literatures. Rising importance of consumer voice in today’s world especially with the changes in communication technologies in markets are discussed in the following chapters. This is what I would like to call “real establishment of market democracy” in today’s digital

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era. Thus, the book focuses on an equalizing and democratic relationship between ordinary consumers and corporate America or any other small- and medium-size companies. The book also introduces a new type of consumer, voicesumer, who shapes our markets and marketing interactions with the advent of social networking sites. The theory needs to focus on different types of voicesumers and how to build mutually beneficial relationship between businesses and voicesumers for the welfare of all market players and society at large. The book discusses both market threats and opportunities for companies and consumers in this new era. It raises attention to change consumers’ behaviors and provide a new perspective for businesses, public policy decision makers, and society at large. This emphasizes the importance of clean consumer voice and potential company-generated manipulations on consumer voice options and implications are also discussed in the following chapters. Finally, the book defines the new economic rules and new value systems shaped by consumer voice and voicesumers themselves. It provides a new perspective to build voice-based consumer empowerment and a market democracy for the benefits of all market players. Thus, it provides a holistic and interesting view about the future of the markets. The theory is talking about influencers, followers, consumer activism and boycott, new types of consumer complaint behaviors, yet not defined if or how these changes created a new type of consumers. Such changes are revolutionizing consumer behavior and psychology literature, thus there are needs and room to conceptualize these changes accordingly. Consumer voice conceptualization and voicesumer, as the loudest consumer we have ever seen, is a candidate to fill this gap as voicesumers continue to strive and transforms markets and society in today’s digital markets.

Contents

1

Voice Voice Silence Noise Physical vs Inner Voice References

1 3 4 8 14 19

2

Consumer Voice Evolution of Consumer Voice Production Era Sales Era Market Era The Internet Era Singularity Era References

21 24 24 25 26 28 35 40

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Voicesumers Types of Voicesumers Boisterous: A Joyful Ride Vociferous: Imperial Has No Clothes Obstreperous: Twitter Tantrums Comparative Analysis of Voicesumers Operationalization of Voicesumers

43 49 51 53 55 58 61 ix

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Audience Message Channel of Message References

63 64 66 67

4

How to Voice Direct Consumer Voice Online Consumer Reviews and Ratings Indirect Consumer Voice e-WOM References

71 74 77 82 85 90

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Voiceconomics The Value of Voice Quantity of Followers Quality of Voice Tone of Voice Consumer Voice Engagement References

95 98 99 103 109 112 114

Conclusion

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

1.1 2.1 3.1 3.2 5.1 5.2

Silence, voice, and noise Exit, voice, and power (Source Kucuk [16]) Types of voicesumers, noise, and silence Vociferous, obstreperous, and boisterous voices Advertising truth effect (Source Wirthwein [28]) Macro vs micro influencer interaction flow

10 29 50 59 103 106

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 3.1 Table 4.1

Evolution of consumer voice Frequency of person appearances in Google Images searches Brand awareness and consumer reviews/ratings

23 51 80

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CHAPTER 1

Voice

Abstract This chapter first discusses the physical or natural form of voice. The chapter defines the voice by discussing its relationships with the concepts of silence and noise with anecdotes in a holistic view. It explains when voice can turn noise and how silence can be reached through noise normalization when there is still perceived noise present. The chapter ends by discussing the differences between physical and inner voices as well as narrative or written voice to emphasize the importance of true value of voice in social relationships. Changes and potential transformation on these concepts with digital revolution are also discussed. Keywords Voice · Silence · Noise · Inner voice · Noise pollution · Noise normalization

How wonderful is the human voice! It is indeed the organ of the soul. The intellect of the man is enthroned visibly on his forehead and his eye, and the heart of a man is written on his countenance, but the soul, the soul reveals itself in the voice only. —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In the first seconds of a birth, first thing a newborn does a scream to push her/his lungs to get a fresh breath and hence a push-start for lungs to the duty will last for a lifetime. This is the first struggle to kick-start a baby’s little lungs, the first step to a new life, the first sign of the existence © The Author(s) 2020 S. U. Kucuk, Consumer Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53983-2_1

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and hence the first shout out to a life. This is “voice.” The voice tells everybody in the operation room that the baby is alive and is here in this world. We all start our lives with this crying scream that brings joy and happiness to many. Nobody thinks that the new one is uncontrollably noisy and loud, but it is perhaps seen as a joyful and an uplifting voice. Either it is heard by many or not, this is the moment when the first voice has unconsciously just formed and filled everybody’s hearts and ears. This is the celebration of adding another breath and voice to the society. The one who might open the windows to the future filled with optimistic uncertainties and new expectations, hopefully to a happy one. What happens when there were no baby screams and there was total “silence” in the operation room? What happens to those dreams about the new coming? Are they all gone and dead now? Everybody wishes to hear that first sound as that is the first sign of life, the first voice at that very moment. Otherwise, all the positivism and excitement turn into silence and anguish. What would you think? You probably think that there is something is wrong, perhaps the baby is not breathing, or she/he is dead. All the struggles and dreams are gone and hence wasted. A bad fortune for that little body and those who are waiting to hear that crazy crying screams, that sign of life. We all get sad if we do not hear those crazy high-pitch screams, and we all get silent. Thus, no sound, no voice means no life, no existence, no presence, no future, just a sheer nothingness and death for the creator of the voice and the others as well. It is just a stagnant moment, a simple dot in time points out nowhere without any purpose and direction. There is no continuum, it is just a dot, not a line. No noise, no voice means that you are simply not there at that moment at that space. You are nonexistent or are perhaps somewhere else, in another dimension, but just not there. Thus, we all die to hear that first sign of existence no matter how much loud it gets. This was, in fact, the case of the first seconds and minutes of my life. My mom still tells the story that when I was born there was no baby screams no sound or no voice in the operation room. Mom still cries whenever tells this story and shares her joy she felt in her heart after doctors made me able to breathe and brought me back to life after a couple of seconds or a minute of complication. She says “when your screams echoed in the operation room, those are the best screams I’ve ever heard in my life. It was like music to my ears.” It was some point ironic to hear this story from my mom who she later always advised me not to raise my voice too much or jump into conversations unexpectedly,

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and in fact, asked me to be a calm-headed person all the time. Well, I turned a little bit vociferous than my peers in my early adulthood and got into some troubles, but I must admit that my incredulous nature helped me to be who I am now. Thus, I started to believe that we need to hear from rebellions and vociferous people in our societies so that we feel like we are alive and have different perspectives. We need to hear from everybody or every sector of the society so that we cannot fall into lies and deception in our constantly evolving societies. The more voices raise, the freer and more prosperous we, as a society, become. Voice, either peaceful or painful, is the sign of existence and is the window opening to unknown and future that we afraid to step into most of the time. In other words, if you kept your thoughts to yourselves, then there would be no progress and understanding what is right and what is wrong in the society. Thus, our problems will grow and grow until they control our lives and perhaps destroy our peace and everything value to us. Thus, voice is needed as it is one of our major life sources that shapes our lives, yet it goes unnoticed at most of the times. Why is that? And why can’t we appreciate the role of voice plays in our lives? How can we understand the importance of voice in our lives? I think we can get some answers to these questions by discussing and defining voice from different angles.

Voice Voice is generally defined as sounds we, humans, produce in our local folds in the larynx. It is as unique as our fingerprints and carries some identification features of our personality, mood, and even health [23]. Sometimes such sounds can carry limited meanings and understandings such as screams that create sound waves that can create some sorts of physical awareness for every living object around us. In prehistoric times, we produce sounds to scare the predators away to hold our ground. That simple sound waves tell the approaching danger that “hey I am here, and this is my ground and I am ready to protect my ground, back it off.” Thus, it is the first signal to others other than visually just being there. Some roars scarier than others, thus reflect a fearless and confident stand while some others do not. Soon we discovered that the loudest the sound gets, the scarier we get and the safer we feel as we hopefully scare the approaching danger away. Later we learned to train the sounds we make and classified such sounds in various categories so that everybody can easily differentiate

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peoples, ideas, and concepts from each other. Thus, different types of sounds can carry different meanings as we were able to attach different meanings and names to those sounds to objects, people, and concepts. This common agreement and understanding in sounds eventually helped us to develop languages and hence delicate and advance communication systems. The archaic function of voice helped us from our enemies in prehistoric times but can also be used as a communication tool when we are dealing with our own kind. In other words, voice is more than just a sound or a vocal expression, it carries meaning that has communicative value in a social setting. It carries the signs of intelligence other than just being a vocal sound with sheer emotions. It also reflects our emotions, fears, happiness, anger, and so on. Thus, voice is the backbone of our social systems, and the source of our collective conscious, in fact, is the very reason of our social existence. Without voice, there will be no communication and no social and individual existence, we would simply be destined to die out and extinct slowly and silently in time; and nobody would know it. All the intelligence and emotions we leave to the world after our time ends can only exist if they can communicate with other generations and hence voice quality. Such as the thousand years of old carvings on the walls of the Peck-Merle cave in Europe, the Sumerian tablets are carved in Mesopotamia, the hieroglyphics carved in pyramids in Egypt, basically everything said and thought before and after us. If those did not share their voices with us, we would not know what our ancestor were up to in old times. Thus, voice goes beyond present, and it could be a window opening to ideas, thoughts, opinions, stories and to the “time.” In some sense, the voice is a voyage in time and in fact into infinity. Yet, we do not understand the wisdom and the value of the voice we created in our society all the time.

Silence Another way to discuss voice is by discussing the silence. General belief assumes that when there is no voice, there is silence. Or, if voice is 1 or a sign of existence, then zero is nonexistence or nothingness. But this might not be true all the time as silence can have various meanings and hence function in different ways compare to voice. Silence is a relative subject and is more than just absence of sound or voice, and many times we don’t realize it until we have it. Similarly, Clifton [4] defines silence by using a metaphor of the space between trees

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in a forest. Most of the time, we do not notice the space between trees like silence and thus silence can be only understood through indirectly or contradictions to voice [17]. This, in turn, indicates very important and contradictory relationship between voice and silence. None of them can be defined without existence of the other as I will try to explain in this section. Many believe that silence can be used as a sign of nothingness. But is there any difference between silence and nothingness? This view is defined by Clifton [4, p. 163] very well as follows: “If silence is distinguishable from nothingness, it is because silence is fundamentally not autonomous. In this respect, “made” silences are different from “real” silences, e.g., the silence of outer space.” In other words, if there is silence there could be something making noise, but in nothingness there is nothing that have potential to generate any sound or voice. Thus, nothingness is less than silence. In the “made-silence,” what you hear is actually the sounds in your ears, but in “real-silence,” you hear things in your mind. Those are two different things in this perspective. For example, I used to go camping by myself. I used to climb up mountains and find a peaceful spot to camp. A spot that is so quiet from outside except a few birds singing; but in my mind, I am going through a lot of thoughts and emotions that I only realize at that moment. Even though the environment was so quiet and peaceful, there were a lot of voices in my mind, I was discussing various issues with different people, analyzing problems, etc. And suddenly I realize that I am in a very peaceful and quiet place in a middle of nowhere, but I cannot stop the voices and noise in my mind. Thus, my inner voice was replaced with my physical silence or voice. At that very moment, I realize that the real purpose of my trip and shut things off in my mind and try to enjoy the silence and peace around me. Then, I turn off my inner voice to get a rest. This experience showed me that Clifton’s “made-silence” and “real-silence” concepts are quite profound concepts. The “made-silence” is what I hear the voices in my mind during my camping, but they go away when I finally get tired by such voices and noises and shot off those thoughts, thus reach ultimate or “real-silence” that I can enjoy. Thus, some sense, you need to reach nothingness to enjoy your “real-silence.” In fact, if you shot off really densely enough you might not even hear the birds singing and flying around you as you reach ultimate nothingness and start your meditation journey in a different dimension as I guess many Buddhist monks experience.

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Silence is also indicator of nonexistence of fully articulative speech and language abilities which in turn makes the storing and sharing information impossible. For example, some scientists claim that Neanderthals went extinct as they were not able to speak the way Homo Sapiens did as their voice box was all the way up to the throat which makes it impossible for them to create better sounds to talk and develop complex languages [7]. In other words, they have limited speech abilities and hence very silent most of the time or there were long breaks between words. If you can’t develop fully articulatable speech, then also your brain could work less and could not develop thought processes and intelligence in some sense. In this context, as we, Homo sapiens, were able to develop advanced speech abilities and hence went through cultural evolutions, Neanderthals got extinct because of silence forced by their anatomic weaknesses. In this sense, silence can eventually sign that your end is near, or sometimes it can be interpreted as the sign of ignorance. However, silence in our cultural environments could have various meaning as we can control when we want to be silent and when to raise our voice in a meaningful way. I have been in many intercultural gatherings in which various languages were spoken. Generally, people first are quiet and read the others’ behaviors as they do not know how to communicate each other. Thus, there was total silence in dinner tables, and everybody was looking at each other, trying to find to way to communicate. A totally awkward social situation. Although each site tried to find a way to communicate each other, they were extremely carefully using their body language, mimics, and smiles and try not to find themselves in a cultural miscommunication chaos. There can be high desires to communicate and know to other side, but they prefer to be quiet because of the risk of misunderstanding. You feel like you are the Ginny who stocked in a bottle dying to come out and talk with everybody. But you cannot. Thus, this kind of silence not necessarily indicates nothingness but perhaps ignorance and fear as indicated by Luhmann [12, p. 33] as follows: “Society does not recognize what cannot be verbalized because it does not know how to deal with it. In silence, society sees only the threat, the ignorance of what cannot be communicated.” If you don’t know what to do, you probably prefer to stay quiet as there might have many risks voicing your thoughts dependent upon the truth you don’t know about it. What is not communicated, as discussed by Luhmann, points out the ignorant silence. This is also echoed with Menninger’s famous quote: “The voice of the intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is

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contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance.” The ignorance of how to communicate and the fear of misunderstood and hated to make us silent and hence make us unpresented at the place and time even though you were physically there. This points out the difference between silence and nothingness at some point. You can be ignorant and silent which shows that you are living in nothingness, do not know what is going around you in social sense. But if you are silent even though you are not ignorant and know what is going on around you that is the silence does not provide value to you and society you are living in. If you stay silent either you are ignorant or not, then you send invitation to those who can take advantages of your silent even though they might be more ignorant than you are. On the other hand, silence has different meaning in different cultures even though you have the knowledge of communication. In some cultures, silence can even have a voice value, and in fact, it can be used as a communication tool. As one of my favorite Pink Floyd songs says, “silence speaks louder than words.” Silence can be as powerful as voice if there is a mutual understanding of the conditions and circumstances. Some people’s silence can say something about them as we sometimes say “his/her silence was very assuring.” In this context, silence can be used as an assurance or acceptance. Thus, sometimes silence can even carry voice function. In the Western world, silence generally indicates a problem, an indication of isolation, unhappiness, disappointment, and in fact, people keep use the phrase such as “s/he was annoyingly quite” or “s/he is quite that I feel something is up.” Silence is a sign of problem in Western cultures. Sometimes it indicates a passive-aggressive and perhaps an adversary stand. It is the effort to distance oneself from what is voiced to show disagreement with what is voiced. That, in fact, is the struggle to develop a reverse identity against what was articulated. Thus, silence can be used as a protest tool. From this point of view, silence has voice itself. In contrary, silence can be interpreted as a positive sign in some Eastern cultures as it emphasizes listening, respect, obedience, or actively receiving what is introduced and voiced; hence sign of interest and active involvement into the source or to the respected. You stay silent until the person who is higher than you are in the social hierarchy give you the chance to express your thoughts. In this context, the lack of understanding the meaning of silence may create severe cultural conflicts—one thinks she/he

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is showing respect while the other thinks that there is a major problem that one is urged to solve. As a result, silence can have various meanings depending on the circumstances. It can be an indication of incommunicability, the sign of nothingness or ignorance, or perhaps assurance. That is actually more than anybody can expect from a concept perceived as very passive and/or stagnant role.

Noise Noise is unavoidable source of distraction of this century. Any sounds that create unpleasant, irrelevant, and senseless experience in our ears are generally defined as noise. If the sound is missing a melodic quality and reaches high decimal that physically gives a receiver discomfort or pain, that sound is defined as noise. Pain created by noise increases as the sound reaches very high pitch. In fact, research showed that noise can distract our nervous system, create headache, increase blood pressure, and in fact lead some physical health problems. Thus, we, as human beings, cannot tolerate every kind of sounds very well. Every individual has their own level of noise tolerance. Some people can easily and deeply disturb by any simple sounds such as munching sound in the mouth while eating or chair legs screeching on the ground. This is a condition called “misophonia” which is defined as “hatred of sound” [6]. These people simply cannot handle these sounds and develop severe anxiety, anger, disgust, hate, and impulsive aggression [18]. Thus, some voice can be irritable, create fear, and perceived as a noise source. Such noise is not wanted and has inherently negative and irritable meaning, yet we sometimes need to deal with it. Either you cover your ears with your hands, or you leave that noise place for a silence. On the other hand, noise can also have a cultural meaning. In some Asian culture, people purposely make munching sound while eating their food to reflect their appreciation to the host, while in most of the Western culture this is an indication of rudeness and not is appreciated. Thus, such chewing and munching sound can generate a cultural misophonia in much of the Western cultures, and you perhaps don’t get a dinner invite again. If there are more than one noise source, then you are talking about noise pollution. The number of noise sources increases, then our happiness and health eventually decline. Noise pollution is inevitable reality in today’s technologically modern societies. Most of us deal with noise

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pollution daily and try to find a place with the right noise level that we can tolerate. Noise population levels constantly increase parallel to technological developments and population. Hence, there is almost no escape from noise in today’s world. Although noise was needed to scare approaching dangers away in prehistoric times, nowadays noise just distracts our daily thought processes and happiness. Similarly, noise can also be used to bring people together. Sometimes we create noise to break the routine and to create awareness. For example, if you need to make an important announcement to a group of people, you raise your voice, in fact, shout or create an unpleasant sound to get everybody’s attention such as hitting a wine glass with utensils to create a high pitch sound gets everybody’s attention. By going high-pitch voice and creating noise, you stop others voice and then bring them back to the dimension and moment where you want them to be so that you can share important information at the same level. It is like arranging your radio to find the right frequency so that you can hear what everybody hears. All the other unpleasant sounds you hear while you are searching the right frequency are noise, but once you find the right frequency your communication gets flowless and meaningful. You just need to go through that noisy transition quickly so that you do not get too much frustration. Thus, noise is a good tool to break the clutter to reach quality voice and common understanding. You simply raise your voice to create noise to get people’s attention. In order to be able to control your own noise, you need to know at which level voice creates destruction, headache, and displeasure in receivers’ mind, thus leads loss of attention and interest. There is a delicate line between what is considered silence, voice, and noise. We often cross those lines and create noise without knowing it. Perhaps people tolerate our noise at that time, but we might leave unpleasant experiences behind. For example, I sometimes raise my voice more than usual to wake up my sleepy students in my early morning classes. That makes them to realize that they are at school not in the bed, and they should start listening me. Those who were already wake and listening to my lecture perhaps see me as a loud and a noisy professor. And, if I continue to be loud all the time, then students probably get exhausted and feel beaten and perhaps will not enroll my class not to be deaf at the end of the quarter. Thus, noise can be used to create just spikes and pulses to get the attention, but it should not be used continuously all the time as it can create destruction and dislike after a while. If I need to picture the differences between such concepts from a mathematical point of view, it will probably look like in

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Noise Normalization

S i l e n c e2

N o i s e Silence1 Voice 0

1

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....

0

1

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Volume

Nothingness

Fig. 1.1 Silence, voice, and noise

At the beginning there is no voice, thus there is silence, which was represented with number zero (silence1 in Fig. 1.1 or what I call “real silence”). Zero indicates that you still might have some numerical presence and perhaps influence compare to nothingness which indicates total out of context or beyond nonexistence presence (any less number other than zero). When some sound physically heard (or volume up from 1, 2, 3, and so on) or somebody raised their voice, that indicated the presence of voice. If the voice reaches some uncontrollable volumes, it transforms itself into noise. However, every individual has different level of voicenoise thresholds. For some, voice can be perceived as noise at an early level of voice volumes while some others might have higher tolerance and feel the noise in later stages. Thus, when the volume of voice was zero, and noise can be any number greater than one and beyond depending on person’s/receiver’s perception or tolerance level of noise as pictured with exponentially increasing lines in Fig. 1.1. When the voice no longer seen as voice but noise, the value of voice and information diminishes as it doesn’t provide any value to a receiver. At that level, noise stabilizes and stays the same as it reaches its limit for the receiver. However, something interesting happens when noise crossed beyond voice quality and stays at the noise level for a long time. We normalize the noise and don’t hear it anymore after a while. For example, imaging you are in a long flight in a passenger plane. At the beginning of the flight, you hear engine noise, other passengers’ noise and more, and some point you ask yourself that

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how you will handle such a noisy cabin throughout the flight. After a couple of hours though, you suddenly feel that you do not hear such noise unless you really force yourself or focus to hear such noises. Basically, your body and your brain adjust your senses and normalize the noise level and you do not hear anything. The question is “where did that noise go?” It actually didn’t go anywhere but your senses adopted such noise level in a way that you don’t hear it, thus you normalized the noise and you reached another level of silence artificially (as defined as “silence2 “in Fig. 1.1). This is an illusionary or a fake level of silence. You simply feel like there is no voice or noise while in fact there is. Similarly, when Donald Trump first started to tweet as president, many people, public, media, and even some of his supporters disturbed by the way he voiced his views either related or not related with his presidency. But, after a couple of years of very controversial and shockingly noisy and destructive presidential twits, nobody feels those shocks anymore when he verbally attacks or bully various public figures as we, public, normalized his noise like our body anatomically adopts itself in a physical noisy environment. His twits or his unrealistic and shocking messaging does not create any more noise as such extreme adjective loses their meanings [24], and we feel social silence and go with it by saying “that’s a new norm now.” This second or fake silence continues until a new shocking or meaningful or stronger voice comes along and attracts our attention. Thus, silence can be discussed in twofold: “real” and “fake” silence. How can you increase the voice volume in social and communication point of view without being perceived as noise? You increase the frequency of times you send your message out. Or you increase the number of times you send, or you raise your voice to receivers, markets, society at the right time and at the right place. Thus, if you make your voice constantly available everywhere, that voice reaches a noise level at which people feel headache by seeing the same thing over and over again. That point your voice loses its value and cannot be heard. This phenomenon is also witnessed in advertisements as it is defined “wear out” effects in the literature [3, 16]. So, how can you reduce level of noise to reach maximum effectiveness in voice? You can just raise your voice to the right people, at the right place with a right medium. If any of them is not established, you deserved to be perceived as a noise. In this context, everything Donald Trump says is seen as sound voice but not noise since his supporters enjoy such communication. Thus, noise limits what the right or optimum level

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of voice should be in order to not to be perceived as noisy and destructive. In some other circumstances, voice can be perceived as noise if it is repeated constantly and unintendedly. Another way to break such wearout or noise effects can be implementing highly divergent messages. The research showed that messages with highly divergent and relevant natures show little advertisement wear-out effects in repeated exposures [3]. It is clear in overall that the balance between what is perceived as silence and voice eventually determines what is perceived as noise. In this context, similar to silence, noise can be discussed in twofold: “actual” or “literal” noise. If voice goes beyond the limits of person’s knowledge and attention span, voice loses its value and can also be perceived as noise. This, in turn, can be defined as “mind” noise. While literal noise creates distraction in our ears, mind noise creates major distraction in our mind and our thought processes. Put simply, noise changes its place in mind noise, from ears to brain. For example, I was leaving my favorite bookstore, I spotted two ladies, who are probably around their late 50s or early 60s are sitting quietly at the bench but focused on their phones’ screen and excitingly punching something in their smartphones. It was a funny scene for me. Clearly, they had a shopping sphere as their plastic bags are hanging from their arms, yet they were glued to the small screens of their smartphones. I could not hold myself and threw a joke and told them “you are so noisy, today.” One of the ladies raised her heads up a little and gave me “hah…what is this weirdo saying?” look. The other lady did not even bother as she seemed in another dimension or another world at the time. I moved on, was smiling, and thinking that “these ladies were so silently noisy.” Although they seemed so quiet from outside, I can tell that they were very busy, loud, and noisy in their mind. I can tell something really exciting was going on in that tinny screen, but I can’t name it. It was definitely a “silence speaks so much louder than words” situation described in Pink Floyd’s famous song. They were in some sorts of trans-mood or kind a flow and out of touch with the reality surrounding around them. That is what I can “silently noisy” mood, which happens more and more everyday many of us. We glued our little screens and cut all the connection with our reality and travel other worlds. With the advent of digital and self-broadcasting technologies on the Internet, we are bombarded with staggering amount of information from various sources, and this, in turn, created unprecedented levels of information overload, which eventually lead to paradoxes and pathologies [1].

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Our brains can store just enough information, and the amount of information goes beyond our storage limits will be perceived as noise. This is what I call “mind noise.” Alternatively, if the voice goes beyond the limits of our basic understanding, that can also be perceived as another mind noise. In other words, giving more information than receiver can comprehend, and process can eventually create noise effects. Further, the receivers can lose attention to what it is voiced if the voicer repeats the same things as the language is beyond the receiver’s comprehension. Although I love to learn new languages, listening a language I do not understand makes me feel like I am hearing meaningless sounds like the ones I hear when I am searching the right a radio station and frequency. Thus, the voicer should use the right language by providing the right amount and right frequencies to be able to reach the receiver. If voicer gives less information then needed (what I call “poor voice” or “underload voice”), receivers will be lost as they cannot hear your voice or understand what the message was fully meant. On the other hand, if the voicer continuously gives more information than needed and comprehended, that will eventually lead to information overload and noise as well. This, in turn, let the receiver lose his/her focus and hence your voice goes nowhere. For example, if you listen to your favorite song over and over again all day, you can have headache and feel tired after a while. You would feel worn off and do not want to listen the song again for a while. Similarly, listening to someone who speaks a different language can be exhaustive as you feel you hear some noises you do not understand as there is no meaning transmission and transformation occurs. Thus, there is no understanding in noise as opposed to voice. If the message cannot be shared in a common ground, then voice cannot be perceived as voice but noise and perhaps distortion. In other words, if you do not want to be seen as a noise source, you need to clear all sorts of misunderstandings and unnecessary information you use in any communication process. Thus, it is necessary to develop a “noise-free voice” in a communication so that you can hear the other side. You don’t need to agree with the person you are trying to communicate, but you need to hear their voice so that you can say “I hear you but I still disagree with you” or alternatively “If I hear you I can agree with you.” The point is reaching noise-free voice so that we can really hear what other side means and hence we can even give negative voices and escalations a better pattern. Thus, sometimes, the major obstacle in front of noise-free-voice is us. If you don’t know how to listen, you can’t hear what is voiced. If you

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continue to live in your inner world and let your inner voice to take control of your thoughts, then you cannot hear others. When you do not hear others, others will not intent to hear your voice either, or you lose your chance to learn from others.

Physical vs Inner Voice Inner voice, also called inner speech, hidden voice, self-talk, or internal dialogue, is different than our outer or physical voice as exemplified above by my alone camping experience and the silently noise old ladies sitting at the bench. This, in fact, indicates the purest form of voice as it stays as an original, authentic, and raw thought process. We, as audience, only get to hear the physical voice in our human to human communications, or limited reflections of our inner voices. Or, sometimes we cannot even hear the inner voice of a person as it is locked inside and can’t explain his words like a little autistic boy [9]. The source of such inner voices is hidden in deep down our consciousness, or sometimes in our unconsciousness as sometimes we simply listen what thoughts are going through our minds. As discussed by Vygotsky, our condensed inner speech, in fact, is the closest thing we can get next to the purest meaning [21]. We internalize what we learned from our external world and that perhaps opens the door to inner speech or inner voice as he discusses. Inner voice can generally more apparent when especially we are reading, studying, and driving [15], or alone camping. Some others claim we use our inner voice when we are under stress or dealing with a problem [8]. Most of time, we probably do not realize that we are listening our inner voice except if you deliberately rehearsing an important future speech such as wedding proposal or preparing for an important job interview. Thus, experience of hearing your inner voice is more common than previously thought [11]. Inner voice indicates your internal dialogues with yourselves. It is how we communicate with our inner self or true self I must say. Thus, inner voice helps us to realize and understand who we are. It provides a self-check option that opens to door to understand our emotions and hence helps us to self-regulate our behaviors in various events [15, 20]. In other words, inner voice tells something about our true self and our true identities. Similarly, we try to find our ideal selves and act like our ideal selves to finally complete ourselves or ultimately reach out our one true self throughout our lives. For that purpose, we sometimes use material objects

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with some social meanings and values (e.g., brands) to reach our ideal selves by expressing ourselves as also widely discussed in “symbolical selfcompletion” theory [10, 22]. We utilize self-completion tools such as clothes, shoes, everything that can express us in the society in a reflection of our inner selves. Those self-completion tools have also voice value as they speak with message receiver in our physical world. Interestingly, in our digital worlds, emojis, avatars, and other consumer-generated digital content are replaced our clothes as self-expression and completion tools. In either way, the underlining proposition is that we have always somebody else inside us that we ideally want to be. However, some of us let lose their inner self and act like the person they want to be, either she/he is valued by the society; while some others like to hide and live their ideal selves inside to protect themselves from society’s potential criticism. As explained by Crossley [5, p. 9], “…the self exists, somewhere either ‘externally’ in terms of certain forms of behavior (as in experimental social psychology) or internally, as an inner self (as in the humanistic, psychoanalytic/psychodynamic paradigms)” [5]. Thus, this inner self has a voice too. In other words, the inner voice is the voice of our inner self that shapes our behaviors and perhaps leads us through many social situations without losing our respect to who we are. But how does this inner self and voice interaction work? When we read a book, we hear our inner voice that follows our inner thoughts. You first hear the words in your head, and then perhaps you start to picture things with the words you hear, and you perhaps enter the author’s imaginary world and start living the story with him/her or with your own version of it. How you pictured and the way you give meaning to words and your thoughts in your head reflects your “inner voice.” Inner voice is the tool of your inner self. We all have inner world where we try to find our ultimate ideal selves with our inner voices. Sometimes we reflect our inner voices outside, which defines the physical voice, so that people can hear what we are thinking. But that does not always guarantee that we see the person’s real self when they talk. You might hear people are saying some sentences like “I was laughing but I was crying inside.” In other words, we are, in some cases, stuck between our real and unintended physical voices. This indicates that we have double lives in many incidences, and hence we do not fully observe our inner voices but the partially. Our inner voices are hidden and private, and it is not meant to be shared with anybody unless the people too dear to our hearts. Thus, we develop some sort of social defense and filtering mechanism inside. And others

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cannot truly hear our inner voices but only pieces of it in a physical form because of our filtering mechanism we created in our mind to protect our real thoughts and ourselves from potential social misunderstandings and misconceptions. Thus, inner voice is our purest defense mechanism we create ourselves. We, in fact, can theoretically define honesty based on the degree of overlap between a person’s inner and physical voices. If there is a total overlap between those two, then we can talk about very honest person. I said “theoretically” in the above definition because it is almost impossible to truly hear somebody else’s inner voice to determine his/her honesty. Thus, we intend to predict others’ inner voices through their actions and behaviors. We mostly do not share our inner voices with everyone and hence our true feelings and opinions openly when we are communicating with strangers or people who are strange to us or potentially threatening us. Since we are not sure about strangers’ true intentions and honesty, we stay silent or play escape games or lie to them to protect ourselves by shielding our true identities and personalities outside world. And hence, we only reflect glimpse of our inner world and inner voice in the physical environments we are living in. Pressuring and blocking such inner voices might lead to snap responses or more impulsive reactions when we are under pressure [20], which also surprises people around us. Vygotsky [21] discusses that our inner voice is the product of our internalization process of our external world. Thus, in a way, we first internalize the events we experienced in our physical environments and selectively process them inside by arguing and talking ourselves with our inner voice to determine what to do. In other words, our world in physical environment shapes our fears and joys and hence feeds our inner voice as well. Our inner world is so sacred to many of us, we don’t let our guards down easily and reveal our real inner world which has its own rights and wrongs perhaps different than many others or socially accepted norms, morals, and rules. As Mecken says, “conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking ” [13]. With the advent of the Internet, our inner voice’s importance is elevated. People started to externalize their inner world easily and often because the anonymous nature of most of the communications. This, in turn, created a fake feeling of security, security of being truly unknown to others in the digital world. You can be anybody at anywhere at any time in the digital world [19]. Nobody can come at your door and do harm to you for something you said, or you did on the Internet if you are a law

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obeying citizen. It is ironic to think that we do not even say hi to strangers on the streets, yet we are not that shy of saying hi strangers in the digital world. This dilutionary feeling of security in the digital world eventually pushed our inner voices come to outside easily and more often. It seems our inner voices started to converge with our physical voices, and in fact they started to replace our physical voices time to time in today’s dynamically changing digital platforms. We started to share our voices as one, an united physical and inner voice, with majority in the Internet either we know them or not, and hence we let our inner voice come out more often as opposed to our communications in the old times in our physical world. Thus, majority of us lost our filtering mechanisms system and started to act like we are all in our own private and share our inner voice, our alternative and extended selves with everyone freely. Eventually, our voices in the digital world reached authenticity. Through our authentic inner voices, we started to discover our true and authentic our real selves and identities in the digital world. Although most of us know that digital platforms are public places where we can meet all sorts of people, we do not mind sharing our inner worlds. We let our inner voices go lose and raise our true voice without worrying about social pressures we used to feel in our physical environments. Nobody exactly knows who you are in the physical world, hence we let our multiple identities flourish and let our true emotions overflow from their banks in this digital world of ours. This is the era we started to define people with not demographics but their identities in the digital world. This trend gained speed with today’s smartphone (aka mobile phone) revolution. The research revealed that consumers are more willing to selfdisclose their own creation of content through smartphones than personal computers [14]. The same researchers found that the part of the reason because consumers psychologically feel comfortable with their smartphones as creating a content, which is another form of voice. Thus, with the increasing usage of smartphones, many online and market conversations are eventually getting very noisy and crowed as alternative to our physical world. We experience our inner selves and inner voices more easily in today’s digital platforms than physical worlds. Perhaps, this is one of the reasons why people are getting easily ballistic and reflecting unexpected behaviors in the digital platforms. Sometimes such behaviors can even surprise the creator of the voice. Many needed to declare apologies for the impulsive and unintended tweets they posted. Thus, on the

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negative side, such impulsive self-disclosing behaviors also create various social problems. Such impulsive tweets and disclosing personal information are intuitive decisions that reflect our inner selves. If we had the similar impulsive and disclosing reactions in our social relationships in physical world, it would have been forgotten over time as our brains have a limited capacity to remember everything. But this is not the case in the digital world as our impulsive tweets are all recorded in the digital world and anybody can see your inside years later. In other words, our digital voices could easily work against us. While our physical voices fade away in the memories of our old friends, our inner voices get more memorable and in fact immortal in the digital world. Furthermore, the research showed that we experience inner voice more often when we are writing and reading [15]. Similarly, our voices are predominantly represented in a written or narrative format in the digital world. We post our thoughts and ideas increasingly as text format especially as a result of the recent smartphone revolution. This, in turn, increases inner voice experiences in the digital world. As a result of this transformation, we started to use our fingers to raise our voices rather than our throat and tongue to make our voice heard in the digital world. If you have fat fingers, your voice sounds like you have a cold. Naturally, our inner voice expressions got more colorful with emojis, avatars, and various forms of consumer-generated semiotics. If you do not know which specific emojis’ meanings, chances are high that you will end up being misunderstood. As Carey [2, p. 23] rightfully indicated: “communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed.” Thus, we started to produce new realities of today’s digital platforms with the content we created in our smartphones, and our inner voice is sitting right at the epicenter of this transformation. From birth to death, we all spend our time in this world by raising our voices either sharing pleasures or pain. Our voice is organic and evolves all the time from physical to digital, from phonetics to textual or pictorial and even video formats. We always discover new ways to communicate with our ever-changing voice options in today’s technologically dynamic world. Consumers are also part of this changing social and technologic environment in our consumption world. They are getting louder and more demanding than ever before and started to determine to shape and control the consumption rhetoric with their ever-changing voice options in the markets. Thus, if we neglect the changes in consumer voice, we cannot find the option of creating innovative and everlasting economic

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systems for the benefit of all market players, consumers to companies alike. This book, in this context, aimed at discussing such changes in consumer voice in a new conceptual discussion in order to be able to shed a better light to better market communications and relationships.

References 1. Bawden, David, and Lyn Robinson. 2009. The Dark Side of Information: Overload, Anxiety and other Paradoxes and Pathologies. Journal of Information Science 35 (2): 180–191. 2. Carey, James W. 1989. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman. 3. Chen, Jiemiao, Xiaojing Yang, and Robert E. Smith. 2016. The Effects of Creativity on Advertising Wear-In and Wear-Out. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 44 (3): 334–349. 4. Clifton, Thomas. 1976. The Poetics of Musical Silence. The Musical Quarterly 62 (2): 163–181. 5. Crossley, Michele. 2000. Introducing Narrative Psychology. London, UK: McGraw-Hill Education. 6. Edelstein, Miren, David Brang, Romke Rouw, and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran. 2013. Misophonia: Physiological Investigations and Case Descriptions. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7: 296. 7. Epic History. 2016. Video: Homo Sapiens vs Neanderthals: The Evolution of Language. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9KnOjsc0g4. Visited on July 24, 2019. 8. Fernyhough, Charles. 2016. The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves. New York: Basic Books. 9. Higashida, Naoki. 2013. The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a ThirteenYear-Old Boy with Autism. Toronto: Knopf Canada. 10. Hönisch, Leonie, and Micha Strack. 2012. My Brand and I-Facebook Brand Pages and Self-Completion. Journal of Business and Media Psychology 3 (2): 12–22. 11. Hurlburt, Russell T., Christopher L. Heavey, and Jason M. Kelsey. 2013. Toward a Phenomenology of Inner Speaking. Consciousness and Cognition 22 (4): 1477–1494. 12. Luhmann, Niklas. 1994. Speaking and Silence, trans. K. Behnke. New German Critique 61 (Winter): 25–38. 13. Mencken, Henry Louis. 1949. A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writings. New York: Alfred Knopf Inc. 14. Melumad, Shiri, and Robert Meyer. 2020. Full Disclosure: How Smartphones Enhance Consumer Self-Disclosure. Journal of Marketing 84 (3): 28–45.

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15. Morin, Alain, Christina Duhnych, and Famira Racy. 2018. Self-Reported Inner Speech Use in University Students. Applied Cognitive Psychology 32 (3): 376–382. 16. Pechmann, Cornelia, and David W. Stewart. 1988. Advertising Repetition: A Critical Review of Wearin and Wearout. Current Issues and Research in Advertising 11 (1–2): 285–329. 17. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas. 2005. The Vociferous Rupture: Silence, Law and Ignorance. Organdi Revue 7 (February): 1–11. 18. Schröder, Arjan, Nienke Vulink, and Damiaan Denys. 2013. Misophonia: Diagnostic Criteria for a New Psychiatric Disorder. PLoS ONE 8 (1): e54706. 19. Thompson, C.J. 2003. Postmodern Consumer Goals Made Easy!!!! In The Why of Consumption: Contemporary Perspectives on Consumer Motives, Goals, and Desires, ed. S. Ratneshwar, D.G. Mick, and C. Huffman, 120–139. London and New York: Routledge. 20. Tullett, Alexa M., and Michael Inzlicht. 2010. The Voice of Self-Control: Blocking the Inner Voice Increases Impulsive Responding. Acta Psychologica 135 (2): 252–256. 21. Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich. 2012. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 22. Wicklund, Robert A., and Peter M. Gollwitzer. 1982. Symbolic SelfCompletion. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 23. https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/what-is-voice-speech-language. Visited on July 29, 2019. 24. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/19/republicans-trump-senatetrial-087344.

CHAPTER 2

Consumer Voice

Abstract This chapter defines the consumer voice through a chronological analysis with anecdotes and cases. It discusses the evolution of consumer voice from the beginning of the twentieth century with the conceptualization of Production Era, to today’s Singularity Era. The changing role and importance of consumer voice in market relationships are also discussed with new conceptualizations from “consumer silence” to “voice domination” and “noise.” Thus, the chapter discusses the meaning of voice for consumers and market democracy by benefiting from developing consumer empowerment and social politics arguments. It eventually sets to stage of the definition of today’s voicing consumers, “voicesumer.” Keywords Consumer voice · Consumer power · Voice equalization · Voice domination · Singularity · Market democracy

A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence. —Sigmund Freud

In traditional marketing, we define consumers as individuals who have money, thus purchase power, and willingness to buy products, services, and ideas. Unless these two conditions are established, you cannot define © The Author(s) 2020 S. U. Kucuk, Consumer Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53983-2_2

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a person as consumers in an economic sense. All the economic entities in a market work for consumers and their happiness as also indicated by Adam Smith as follows “consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production” [28, p. 49]. Thus, consumer is the one who determines the faith of company’s and market’s existence and hence economic future. In this respect, we also institutionalize consumers by defining them as the final member of marketing distribution channels, thus as a major power player and market agent [8]. Yet, consumers are seen generally passive and sometimes silent market players and hence they have unexercised power or sometimes seen powerless [15]. In other words, they were “silently noisy” (as explained in the previous chapter) as their voice stuck in friendly ingroup conversations and could not reach the markets for a long time. From traditional marketing point of view, a person without purchase power and willingness can be defined as silent consumer, and in fact silent market actor. On the other hand, consumers who have no idea what to buy, or with uninformed and uncompromised demand can be defined as a consumer living in nothingness as they have no clue about market dynamics and value systems unlike the one defined as market mavens [9] who are very well informed. In this context, a consumer who has knowledge, experience, and purchase power, yet does not want to share his/her positive or negative views can be defined as silent consumers. Such consumers perhaps see that there is no need or no option to voice their views to other like-minded consumers, companies and in fact legal agencies. Such silence is not a good news for markets as potential buyers can easily fall in prey of unethical business practices. Thus, I want to add another dimension to the definition of traditional consumer. And that is consumer’s willingness to voice either consumer experienced the products, service, and ideas as the absence of this dimension can bring the markets into its knees. Thus, today’s consumers should not only be defined as purchase power and willingness to buy but also willingness to inform markets by raising their voicing about their experiences and stories within markets, as these consumers are not actively influencing many purchase decisions and acting like an alternative market information agents in today’s dynamically changing digital markets. I need to emphasize the fact that this not only good for the benefits of consumers but also companies and markets. In this context, any types of consumer expressions and communication (verbal or non-verbal, silent or loud, bitter or sweet) that empowers and advocates individuals’ or a group of consumers’ well-being by providing

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Table 2.1 Evolution of consumer voice

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Time

Marketing orientation

Consumer voice Tone of voice

1900–1950

Production era Sales era Market era

Silent

1950–1970 1970–1990 2000–2010 2010–now

Consumer silence Legalized voice Collective voice Internet era Voice equalization Singularity era Voice domination

↑ | ↓ Noisy

reliable information about products and services should be considered as consumer voice. Such expressions generally aim at supporting consumer wellness and dignity, as well as companies’ socially responsible business practices. Thus, it is expected from companies to listen consumer voice and understand consumers’ expectations and/or integrate such consumer voice into their business philosophy. This, in turn, provides companies a healthy market growth and long-lasting positive consumer-company relationship and hence company presence in markets. This is only through accessing and analyzing such meaningful consumer intelligence that can help companies to close gap between consumers’ desires and the company’s offerings, which in return brings a vibrant and healthy economic system. Thus, consumer voice is at the heart of better market relationships between consumers and companies and bring markets a democratic communication structure among market actors, which I defined as “market democracy” [18, 19]. I should emphasize that any discussions about marketing theory without consumer voice would have a lack of theoretical merit especially with the head-spinning changes with the Internet revolution. However, it is not easy to reach such a balancing and democratic consumer-company communication and market relationships. As expected, consumer voice went through decade-long evolutions until really reaches its own potential to influence and change the markets for the benefits of all. This evolution of consumer voice was also parallel to the evolution marketing theory was going through at each stage as also pointed out with a chronological order in Table 2.1.

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Evolution of Consumer Voice Consumer voice has gone through a couple of stages since the beginning of the last century as also pointed out in Table 2.1. The evolution of consumer voice was not independent from the marketing orientation and marketing theory in its time as indicated with separate columns in the table. Further, from silent to noisy, the transformation in the tone of consumer voice was also discussed in another column. The following sections will be discussed based on the outlined historic evolution of consumer voice in marketing theory as reflected with Table 2.1’s framework as follows. Production Era Consumer silence means nonexistence of consumers in the markets, or at least presumption that consumers are not part of any market value creation systems, thus they are passive acceptance of whatever introduced to them by the company. This indicates very autocratical relationship between company and consumers in the markets where consumers have no power and voice to reflect their views. In the early 1900s, consumers have left in the dark most of the time as there were few options to buy from, and there was no healthy and truthful market information mechanism that consumers receive reliable information from about the products and services produced in the markets. Consumers made decisions based on very limited or almost no information about how the product/services produced. This situation is echoed with famous Henry Ford’s quote: “Consumer can pick any color car so long as it is black.” This period is defined as “production era” in marketing history as also indicated in Table 2.1. In this era, marketing was used as equivalence of production as all the marketing mechanism highly dependent on production function. Thus, consumers were deaf and blind and have no option to pick and hence blindly accept whatever is produced for their consumption. Most importantly, nobody cares what consumers think about products/services and consumer voice is almost nonexistence. There was almost no legal regulation to protect consumer voice and complaint behaviors. Thus, the production era can also be defined as “consumer silence” as there was no consumer voice or at least there was no actively function consumer voice in the markets and everything was controlled by the company and for the company’s benefit only as also described in Table 2.1.

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Sales Era However, production levels and number of different types of products and services are exponentially increased especially after the Second World War. In order to keep production levels stable during slowly cooling off economy after the war, manufacturers needed to find new buyers and markets. In this period, consumers had more options and better chance to access to better products in the markets. In this era, consumers could pick products for themselves, but mostly based on the information selectively provided by salesman. The product information introduced with various sales tactics was sometimes misleading and unreliable as sales of product was the ultimate goal of the marketing efforts rather than producing better-functioning products and services for consumers to satisfy their needs. Thus, this time is generally called “sales era” in marketing history as pointed out in Table 2.1. In this era, marketing’s aim is shifted from stimulating consumers’ needs to manipulating consumers’ needs for the sake of sales and profits. Marketing got its bad name from sales techniques developed in this era. Consumer voice is, naturally, focused on manipulations and unethical sales techniques of companies at that time. However, there was no voicing mechanism in place in markets unless you hear some feedback about the products and salesmen from the people in your inner circles. In other words, consumer voice was still not active and didn’t have place in company’s design and production philosophy. Consumer voice is looked down and consumer complaints had minimum impact on general market relationships as consumers had no place to go discuss and spread the word about such unethical sales practices the way marketers advertise their products. This is the era many consumers realized that there must be a strong marketing voice in markets to even up the potential power gaps between consumers and companies. Consumer struggled to find their voice as they had first time faced with the widespread unethical marketing practices in this scale. In this period, government needed to intervene to regulate unethical and harmful business practices that harm consumers. This is echoed with John F. Kennedy’s famous “Consumer Bill of Rights” that establishes four major consumer rights: “the right to safety,” “the right to be informed,” “the right to choose,” and finally “the right to be heard.” Among these new four consumer rights, consumer voice was first time legally recognized with “the right to be heard” as a right. In other words, it officially marks the birth of the consumer voice as an indispensable component of market mechanism. “The right to be

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heard” made it easier for consumers to raise their voice to federal agencies about any misleading and unethical business practices. Eventually, this was the first step toward the democratization of relationship between consumers and companies for the sake of consumer welfare and betterfunctioning markets. This is the era first time consumer voice entered under government protection, and hence I name this era “legalized” or “legitimized voice” as also indicated in Table 2.1. Market Era In 70s, product catalogs and face-to-face sales tactics were started to be replaced with TV advertisements. With the increasing product and service offerings in markets during 70s, TV as a new sales tool reached consumer masses. Consumers were exposed more products and services but the communication on TV is one-way street, and consumer feedback has never heard back as TV was also heavily control by corporations. In this period, the most desired consumer voice was the positive ones as negative voice was stuck in personal conversations. Although consumers practiced their “the right to be heard” and complaint about misleading business practices to Federal agencies and perhaps organized protests, consumer voice was never able to bypass the powerful corporate broadcasting filters to influence bigger crowds. Thus, the only way to raise consumer voice was to organize protests and boycotts and hence started to be developing a “collective voice” to stand against the companies that are implementing deceiving and unethical marketing practices as pointed out in Table 2.1. This was not an easy task for an individual or a group of consumers, hence consumer voice was still ineffective but showing some signs of life. Consumer could get together and protest some unethical business practices and bad products through using their social power which reveals itself as collective movements, consumers were still powerless against companies’ media power to reach masses and change their consumption patterns for their benefits. Clearly, consumer voice and consumption are not separate issues, and hence consumer voice can only be heard the degree which influence the consumption. In this context, during this time, Hirschman’s [12] famous work “Exit, Voice and Loyalty” defined the importance of “voice” for both companies, organizations, and markets. Hirschman indicates that if company misbehaves or runs unethical business practices, then consumers can have

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two options either they leave the market to create an economic pressure on company, which he called “Exit” or they raise their voice to complaint and hence change the wrongdoings, which he calls “Voice.” In this respect, Exit is the focus of economists—in keeping with their fondness for the theory of Invisible Hands, but political scientists have addressed voice as a feedback mechanism that provides actual and valuable information about why the company has lost the consumers [16]. In this context, Exit and Voice relationship should be understood better in order to understand the real contribution of consumer voice in markets and market relationships. Although Exit and Voice, by nature, have different presumptions, they are inseparable. According to Exit, consumers solely act with economic self-interest and thus new social values can easily be dictated to consumers as long as economic self-interests are satisfied. This I believe is a false assumption that companies can survive as long as they can buy out their consumers with big-budget marketing campaigns. Voice reverses Exit’s perspective and emphasizes the consumer’s role and involvement in social value development with the support of legal systems in markets; thus, one of the main purposes of the voice was to develop better-functioning market systems that motivates consumer-company relationship. Another important issue is Exit increases consumer alienation while Voice increases consumer interest and involvement in markets. Similarly, Exit can be a silent indicator, but Voice was the louder and perhaps more expressive than Exit. Thus, it seems Voice serves better to the society’s and markets’ needs than Exit. On the other hand, consumers generally implement both Exit and Voice strategies at the same time to send a signal to companies when they are leaving the markets, thus the interaction between Exit and Voice plays very important role on how consumer voice can really function in markets. As a result, 70s is the period, marketers, in the first time, realized that consumers can also have collective power to change the consumption direction and market relationship by leaving markets and raising their voice. However, consumers are still not armed with effective communication and broadcasting tools to send their message across and voice their concerns as a separate and individual market agent and player. It was also very hard to reach masses and organize them around a common cause with one voice at that time. Although companies increased their effort to listen and understand consumers by developing various marketing research tools, consumer voice was again stuck in the footnotes of marketing research reports and is not appreciated by marketing

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executives in practice. Thus, during 70s to 90s, although consumer voice started to raise importance in company’s business philosophy, the translation of consumer voice into business implications wasn’t sufficiently executed to unlock the insights of consumer voice. This era is generally called “market era,” in fact, some claims that this is the time modern marketing mentality was formed. Yet market mechanisms fallen short hearing true consumer voice as they had still major broadcasting power to lead the crowds to consumption. This lack of understanding of consumer voice is later pointed out by Hirschman [12] as “a missed golden opportunity.” Companies started to listen their consumers to better understand the market demand. In other words, companies, most of the time, used the consumer voice for their own benefits not for consumer welfare all the time. These are the times majority of marketing scholars defined consumers as the most important market actors and in fact called them “King” for the benefit of the company. Shifting from slave status in the production era to king status in the market era, consumers exercised very limited power to control market voice. Although consumers were called king for the sake of marketing discussions, in reality they were nearly powerless against corporate marketing machines. Thus, their voice heard intermediately in consumer markets although they were “presumed” to be the most powerful market player at the time [17, p. 327]. This worked well for companies as they were benefiting from their powerless consumers by pathing them behind. This was the irony of the market era, the insincerity of companies for the purpose of benefit not for market welfare. The Internet Era The trend finally changed for the benefits of consumer voice with the Internet revolution in the late 1990s. The Internet is used as an effective shopping tool at early times, but later consumers realize that they can also use the Internet to access social networks, groups, and society to communicate each other and send their message across. Thus, the Internet created a new forum for public voice and help consumers rally around important market issues that they can voice their views. Consumers eventually reached very active and exercisable voice with social networking sites on the Internet. This also changed the Exit and Voice interaction in the markets as consumers started to feel the power of their voice in the first time in business history. One should not assume that Voice can be

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discussed separately especially in the digital world. Although consumer Exit options changed dramatically, cyberspace should not be governed only by Exit because markets that are governed solely by Exit will not incorporate society’s collective values [25]. As I explained this issue in my previous work, exit might put collective values in danger because of the lack of strong or balanced “voice” in digital markets [16]. In this era, voice is seen as one of consumers’ major power sources as a result of the changes in technologic, social, and legal systems in this new digital world [15]. Later, I defined this as voice-based consumer power while I defined exit-based consumer power in which economic, technologic, and social power sources interact [19]. In Exit, as depicted in the top, left-hand of the triangle in Fig. 2.1, Internet technology provides price transparency, it is easy for individual consumers to maximize their outcomes by switching to better value offerings, hence they are economically empowered in the digital world [16]. These technologic advancements also made easier to organize collective anti-consumption movements, which can be seen as a social consumer power [16]. Although small businesses may feel the individual consumer exit immediately, such as in the case of exit of a loyal consumer, exit can solely be felt at the macro-level when consumers leave the market together [2]. Therefore, as a result of the synergy created by Exit’s consumer power sources, a new sector evolved of consumers who are able to find the best deals in the market and influence like-minded consumers’ preferences, thus acting as alternative “reflexive market agents” [5] or “market actors” [26] with the ability to change the direction and modes of consumption [16]. This synergetic interaction between exit’s power sources is also indicated in the upper triangle of Fig. 2.1.

E X I T

Consumer as Market Actor

Economic

Technologic

Social

Legal Consumer as Citizen

Fig. 2.1 Exit, voice, and power (Source Kucuk [16])

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These empowerments in Exit would not be possible without improvement in voice as voice can also feed and lead exit as well [19]. Thus, the lower triangle on the right of Fig. 2.1 depicts the second function in the double-functional role of technologic and social power sources for consumers. Supported by legal entities and/or governments, consumers are able to use voice as a mechanism for responsible citizenship as opposed to simple economic well-being [16]. With the enhanced speech, equality as a result of the advancement in Internet technology as well as creation of consumer-created online community identities empower consumers to develop their own alternatives to marketer-generated brand identity and values. In other words, social and technologic power sources are shared by the upper (number of consumers involved in anti-consumption and ease of exiting the market together) and lower triangles (speech equality and creation of alternative social value systems) in Fig. 2.1 [16]. These power sources function differently for exit and voice—leading to “consumer as market actor” and “consumer as citizen,” respectively. Thus, consumers, first time in business history, are seen as “members rather than customers” [24, 25]. In this way, consumer voice is not just a preference-expressing mechanism on the Internet, but also a way for responsible and ethical individuals dedicated to society’s collective value system to express themselves [16]. Thus, we need to discuss such power components in order to understand the evolution of consumer voice. Although writing a song is the most effective way to protest the wrong practices, politics, company wrongdoings between 70s and 80s; during 2000s, many consumers started protesting company wrongdoings with the help of user-generated media tools in their own blogs, social networks, and videos rather than leaving the stage to professional songwriters or protest-organizers. Technologically, the Internet introduced a non-hierarchical distributed network system, which allows all parties to be equal to each other in status in the networked structure [16]. Strictly from a technological standpoint, individuals are now on the same footing with the corporation—the corporation has a website and so does the consumer [15]. In other words, the Internet is a technologically transforming platform where free speech, hence voice, can easily be exercised. This, in turn, created “voice equalization” in market communications between consumer and company because of the Internet’s democratic architecture as also pointed out in Table 2.1. This is the era the “true” consumer voice was really born. As I indicated in one of my previous work, “the industrial revolution was to manufacturers what the digital revolution is to

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consumers ” [15, p. 47]. This was truly the new era where consumers have started to be gaining the control of market voice [16]. Companies who realized this transformation early on tried to integrate consumer voice on their company websites and social media platforms with online discussion sites so that they can get ahead of the game by winning consumer voice and influencing the direction of market conversations. They made direct complaining to company easier for consumers. Basically, companies opened their operations to consumers and tried to inject company views into market conversations. In this era, consumer voice first time received importance in company systems as consumers were able to raise their voice and influence other like-minded consumers, third parties, government, and hence overall market conversations. However, such voice equalization was only limited to the ones who have computers and access to the Internet as well as knowledge of how to use such new technology. Thus, there was also access inequalities and hence Digital Divide (DD) between different sectors of the society in early years of the Internet era [16, 18]. Without consumer accessibility to market information and ability to raise voice, consumers who are outside the digital world were at serious risk. Such technologic advancement eventually enabled consumers to get together with like-minded others and exchange their ideas in the digital spaces. From social point of view, the Internet might be the most powerful tool to organize people to date. Online networks and communities are actually producing and creating new value systems on the Internet [16]. In the past, it was easy for consumers to feel alienated from the seller and marketplace, and, therefore, many felt helpless and powerless when it came to redressing wrongs [1]. Previous studies have shown that consumer alienation often leads to consumer silence when it comes to registering complaints [27]. The Internet, however, has increased the probability that even consumers who feel alienated will take the affirmative step to complain because they can connect with online communities [10]. Many consumer-organized anti-brand sites include discussion forums or other online community spaces [10, 16] where consumers can participate by discussing unethical and/or harmful implications of specific brands in order to develop community identity and meanings alternative to company-created market meanings [3, 4, 31]. These alternative consumption meanings and messages can easily be spread to the markets to inform other like-minded consumers. Thus,

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companies, first time, realized the power of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), which can reach limitless numbers of individuals in a very short period of time, and devastate company’s image and brand value compare to traditional WOM in this era. Legally, consumer voice is protected by the First Amendment right to free speech in the United States and in many Western countries. The law even protects many consumer-organized anti-brand sites if they are not profit generating, thus limiting the effect of corporate legal action and enhancing the legal power of these sites, and hence consumer voice [16]. In TMI, Inc. v. Maxwell, 2004, the court held that the website owner could share his complaint with other consumers on his site or on his domain name. The court in Lucas Nursery & Landscaping, Inc. v. Grosse, 2004, found that the plaintiff was not trying to benefit financially by using the defendant’s trademark. There is at least one legal ruling which holds that a trademark in domain names created by non-licensed sites or users is generally not treated as trademark infringement because such use does not lead to trademark dilution due to brand confusion [14]. Although companies tried to use many brand dilution and infringement laws, this new consumer-generated anti-branding dilution cases had limited support from the Court, at least now [21]. Furthermore, as a result of voice-based consumer power, we witness more consumers acting with the sense of responsible citizenship rather than consumption-oriented motives in this era, which I call them “consumer citizens” [16] as also depicted in the lower part of Fig. 2.1. The birth of voice-based consumer power pressured companies to listen their consumers more and hence change their traditional business mentality dramatically. Some tried to fight with this newly rising consumer power to protect their consumption value systems, some others, smartly, focused on finding the way to integrate consumer voice in their own system to benefit it from raw and true consumer culture. Thus, one of the most important takes away from the Internet era is consumer-company rapprochement and consumer reintegration into company systems. Some companies rediscovered their loyal consumers in different avenues. In some cases, company’s loyal consumers started to work for company like their own employees. This showed that Alvin Toffler’s futuristic came to reality as “prosumers” (producer consumers) concept which indicates production by consumers [29]. Consumers were actively involving product design and market voice creation processes as some point companies felt like consumers are breathing down the company’s neck in every

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angle of production process. This was the time open-source operations gain speed, and many companies try to benefit from consumer creativity and innovativeness. Some companies started to use online consumer communities they developed under their domain and use such online communities to recruit, train, and support new consumers with product and service problems. This eventually reduces consumer support expenses and increases consumer satisfaction for the benefits of the company. But this went way too far for some companies. For example, AOL had more loyal volunteers than employees to work for them in their network that this eventually put them odds with the Labor Secretary in the United States.1 Thus, increasing voice equalization is eventually led the way to consumer-company unification, from equalization to unification, for companies’ loyal consumers in some industries. For some other industries, consumers independently created their own version of products/services (e.g., Firefox) for free for the other consumers while corporate alternatives (e.g., Windows Explorer) charging fees. This is the time corporations started to lose their market voice and some of their production power to consumers and this has never seen in business history until that time. On the other hand, the more corporate voice lost its market power to consumer voice, the more desperate some corporations got, and they started to hire ordinary consumers in an attempt to disseminate their own version of market messages through them. At the time, marketergenerated content and voice had less value and perceived dishonest by consumers, while consumer-generated content received the utmost trust by consumers. Thus, some corporations and third-party organizations attempted to re-gain the control of market messaging in a sneaky way, which also gave a birth to a new type of consumer voice: “paid consumer voice” (aka “paid bloggers”). Since such consumers are paid for the evaluation of the products/services for the others, this can’t be defined as true representation of consumer voice as some others labeled this practice as bribing consumer for company’s benefits [18]. Furthermore, some companies also used automated voices to mimic consumer voice to introduce their secret agenda to markets. Many of us fallen into pray of corporations’ sneaky consumer voice impersonations in that time. Some consumer watchdogs revealed the ugly truth behind fake consumer voice and FTA issued new regulations to protect the authenticity of consumer 1 Hallissey v. America Online, Inc. C.A. No. 1:99-3785, Docket No. 1443 (S.D.N.Y. April 15, 2002); https://priceonomics.com/the-aol-chat-room-monitor-revolt/.

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voice at the time by mandating consumer influencers to declare publicly if they got paid by any company either cash or gift.2 We, further, witness more consumer activism such as anti-branding and anti-consumption movements that targets socially irresponsible corporate strategies. Many of these activists attacked the corporations’ cultural and brand power, and alternatively developed their own version of brand semiotics in their digital platforms under the protection of the First Amendment Right of Free Speech. This was defined as “subvertisement” (subverting advertisement [20]) as consumer activist tried to subvert the corporate brand meanings and consumption culture. This consumer uprising also defined as “semiotic emancipation,” which is a representation of a collision of consumer identities with corporate brand identities [22]. The semiotic emancipation was also the result of clash between capitalized meaning systems by corporations and consumer-generated metaphorical meaning systems in the digital world as rightfully explained by Katyal [13] as follows: “a major conflict between two different kinds of markets; the market of economic value (goods and property), and the market of meaning and metaphor” [13, p. 836]. This, I believe, also directly related to Hirschman’s Exit and Voice. Voice, as the representation of market of meaning and metaphors, started to clash with Exit, as the representation of economic value systems, in this era to create a better balanced and more democratic market structure for all. As a result, company’s dependence on consumer voice was increased in this era. This also introduced a better potential to create collective value systems in cyberspace and put corporate in defense in many issues. This era was a kind of reckoning time for corporations. This era also revealed that reaching authenticated and purified consumer voice with the support of company can lead synergy in market voice and maximum impact in society. However, companies are having hard time to create a balance between company’s philosophy (inherently focuses on profit maximization) and consumer voice as there are various philosophical differences between company and consumer views. Although companies wanted to integrate consumer voices into their systems, problems are which kind of consumers and/or how much of the consumer voice should be given through company systems. The specific question was corporations were struggling: What was the weight of integration of consumer voice into 2 FTC’s Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising (16 C.F.R. Part 255).

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company’s own messaging systems? Although the answer of this question might change company to company and industry to industry, one thing is clear that such rapprochement started during the Internet age. Singularity Era With the advent of smartphones during 2010s, consumer voice entered a new phase. In this era, consumers can easily access to digital world with smartphones as majority of consumers can effort various range of smartphone options which carry broadband features to access to digital world 24/7. Smartphones are easy to carry than computers yet perform at almost computer functionality levels with their computer-like high memory capacities. Thus, majority of the digital divide problems cause by not to be able to access to technology, specifically computers, were mostly solved in this singularity era. Furthermore, smartphones provided ease to use features and conveniences to consumers. The technological knowledge required to use the smartphones very low for anybody (any age). This was not the case during the Internet era as it was difficult to access to the digital world without advance experience and skills of computers. This was conceptualized as the “second-level of DD” [11], reveals an even bigger divide between generations (young and older users) or knowledge of how to use technology rather than owning a technology to access to the Internet in the Internet era. In other words, singularity era started with very limited digital divide and access problems. In fact, access to the Internet was first defined as a basic right in this ear as it is believed that every individual can/should enjoy their right to be informed and right to be heard in the digital spaces by having right to access to the Internet [22]. As a result, the digitalization of markets was reached high levels with this smartphone technology. Consumers can be anywhere and at any time to share their stories and influence other like-minded consumers in real time, at any time and in fact all the time. Consumer can now access to their social networks, like-minded fellow consumers and millions of other with no effort as automated systems informed them simultaneously. Consumer can feel their power literally at their fingertips. Speed of information sharing and consumer voice dissemination into markets is so fast that companies are now falling behind to listen and understand what consumers are saying and how to counter such consumer voices. Today’s consumers are acting like individual media broadcasters walking with their cameras

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attached to their smartphone in their hands, recording, reporting, and informing massive amount of audiences about everything at any time. Videos, stories, and pictures are flooding in digital public spaces for the consumption of other like-minded consumers. All these self-made, authentic, pure, and original content created by ordinary people who has no or limited profit expectations pushing the major media source content off the roof at the beginning of this era. Every product and service are reviewed and labeled by consumer review and complaint sites immediately with rich media tools. The whole digital markets are now turned to be giant evaluation systems with consumer voice. Thus, with the increasing inclusion of consumer voices in real time in today’s markets, consumers dominantly shape market opinion while marketers are out of breath. In this environment, companies are no more scandal proof and if anything goes wrong for a company that will be heard in consumer markets immediately. Companies are now constantly consumers 24 hours watch. In some cases, such consumers are reaching and influencing the society faster than professional media broadcasters. Each individual consumer had ultimate voice power to spread the bombshell news and stories every minute. You can reach a celebrity or influencer status overnight. This is the era of personal voice not corporate or any institution’s voice. Even corporate CEOs need to personalize their own voice alternative to their corporate voice as all the communication is going person to person not person to organization or vice versa. I see corporate CEOs voice their own ideas and inject their corporate philosophy like individual consumers in the social media. This spread of power of voice from major media broadcasters to individual consumers created a pluralistic voice and energetic social system. This reminds me the tremendous energy created when little nucleus split. Thus, I call this “Einstein Voice” inspired by Albert Einstein’s famous formula about energy: e = m × c 2 . With the advent of smartphones, I reformulated this famous equation as: empowerment = media × consumer2 . Every single individual consumer became a separate media source/broadcaster in the digital markets like little atoms, and true “consumer empowerment” is now unleashed from these individual atoms in the society. Imagine millions and billions of consumers act like cameramen, photographer or storyteller walking on the streets, malls, beaches, and recording, cutting and pasting various stories about products and services like professional media broadcasters for the public attention. This

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is what I call “singularity era” as every individual consumer is technologically empowered and has now full control of their own voice and can easily raise their voice in markets at any time without any control of corporate and government media filtering tools. This also increased the noise amount in consumer and market voice to the levels we have never seen before as also indicated in the last column of Table 2.1. Consumer voices eventually started to dominate market message and discussions (defined as “voice domination” in Table 2.1) as companies are struggling to listen and deal with millions and billions of consumer voices in the singularity era. Such singularity eventually generates unprecedented amount of social energy in consumption spaces. This social energy, or I should say social atomic energy, can in fact crush company’s most valuable assets including brand equity and brand value in an unpresented way. Now we can easily see the consumer voice’s impact on stock markets in real time if they synchronized around a corporate wrongdoing as recently happened in “United Airlines” (UA) scandal as I talk about it more as follows. I still can’t forget the day I saw the UA scandal. It was another gloomy and rainy Monday morning in Seattle, and I was following my regular news channel while working on my stuff. Suddenly, I was alarmed with a strange screaming sound coming from my TV. I turned my head to the screen and started to watch the news to figure out what that strange sound was about. What I saw was a video shot by a passenger showing that security officers are dragging a passenger from his seat from an overbooked UA Sunday flight. The poor passenger is in bloods and screaming for help. All the other passengers are shocked and screaming to security officers, a total chaos, a very disturbing and horrifying picture. That passenger’s voice and screams literally haunted me all day long since there was no escape from this scene as I saw the video over and over again everywhere, I turned all day. My shock got more traumatizing when I realized that I could be the one who is dragged forcefully from my seat even though I paid my ticket and did nothing wrong. To make things worse, the reason behind this violent act was to open a space for the UA own employee who missed the previous flight. So, the company was simply saying that my employees are more important than my consumers. Those are the consumers that the company is supposed to be serving even though it committed to do that before selling these seats to the consumers and promise to serve them and serve them well. This simple, but timely and justified video recorded by ordinary passengers in that flight shared in consumer social networking sites and picked

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by various media sources. Thus, within hours millions of people had a chance to see this horrific event. When this video dropped like a bomb in major news channels air; tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of people saw what happened in that flight all around the world. The video even created an outrage and furor in international markets specifically in China where most of the international flights directed to by UA. The speed of dissemination of the video was amazing. In a less than a day, one simple but disturbing management mistake was the conversation subject in everybody’s dinner tables, living rooms, streets, basically everywhere. Such public shock reflected itself as stock devaluation of the company. The incident happens on a Sunday flight, and the video is broadcasted in major social networking sites and various digital media outlet immediately from Sunday night to Monday morning. On Monday morning, UA stock prices started to drop as a result of this less than a minute-long video. But, on Tuesday, the outraged to the airlines in public was so unbearable that the companies the airlines stock prices dropped sharply. Millions of people all around the world watched this video, and every time people hear the voice of this unlucky passenger’s screams, the stock prices of UA is dipped further. Every time people heard this passenger’s helplessness, a new boycott and protest site was opened in various social networking sites targeting UA. Every time people saw this passenger’s bloody face on the screen, UA lost another loyal passenger of own. The CEO’s apologies and promises were not even heard as the company’s explanations and justifications are silenced by rising consumer voice. At some point, consumer voice equalization went beyond itself and declared its own true consumer kingdom and crushed corporate manipulations in the public eye. This would not happen in none of the voice evolution stages discussed in this section. The UA case shows that this singularity era is the consumer era in which companies can’t escape from voice-based consumer empowerment. Consumers are no longer passive receiver or not even ordinary voicers of their complaints, they are, in fact, active broadcasters, newsmakers, storytellers and hence they are dominating markets with their voice and holding the public’s pulse and threaten company’s economic existence. Now, companies no more need consumers only for consumption of their products and service but also for their propaganda and voice power to survive in today’s challenging markets. Furthermore, this also gave a new meaning to “consumer citizenship” understanding, introduced in Fig. 2.1. When public service providers

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failed to enforce the law and social protocols, today’s consumers started to implement digital vigilantism [23] techniques by utilizing collective and individual consumer voice. Such consumers first identify wrongdoings and potential criminal acts with digital evidences they collected such as pictures and videos of perceived wrongdoers. These evidences are also shared with service providers so that they can be held accountable against such perceived wrongdoers. Thus, consumers no more only expressing their views but also go beyond and using new interventions strategies to the ones who were able to escape from public service providers’ radar. After defining wrongdoers, some consumer citizens go after these individuals and try to punish and intimidate them at the absence of service providers. This clearly goes beyond being consumer citizen as these consumers openly and publicly humiliate perceived wrongdoers. This phenomenon is also known as “doxing” [7], publishing others’ personal information with the intent to punish, humiliate and intimidate, contribute to privacy violations. In other words, publicly available information about perceived wrongdoings, their visibility, is used against them in doxing acts (aka “weaponized visibility” [30]) to serve perceived justice and fairness. Thus, transgressors themselves become the victim of a new transgression for the sake of societal justice [6, 23]. Thus, this practice both has good and bad sides. It is good that consumer citizen takes the matters in their hands by using social media platform to stand against lawless acts by filling the gap created by lack of public servers. This level of interventionist consumer citizenship behaviors can produce helpful results and perhaps used as an early warning system for the welfare of the society especially when there is a national emergency. On the other hand, if used by wrong people such doxing behaviors can get as disruptive and hurt society’s basic value systems. In this singularity era, consumers can dominate market messaging with their version of stories. This, in turn, generated a very noisy markets as it got very difficult to differentiate what is right, wrong, true, or fake story or voice. It seems the loud voices get the first attention even though they shouldn’t in most of the circumstances. Thus, market voice started to destroy the quality and reliability of the consumer voice as it is not clear how much of the consumer voice is genuine and true in today’s world. That eventually hurts consumer power because of this consumer-generated and sometimes machine-generated and unclean and untruthful voices in the markets. Although these developments brought

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more powerful and dominating consumer voice in markets, it also generated more noise and confusion in consumption worlds. Thus, this era can also be defined “noisy era” as there are no tools and regulations to pass through such noise bubbles created by various third parties that send the truthful, reliable, and needed information across to others. As a result, I don’t think it is fair to define today’s consumers with only their ability and willingness to buy dimensions but their ability to influence and change the market conversations. And I do not think it is fair to call them “consumers” anymore as they function more than just simply being a traditional consumer or market agent. They are not only consumers who buy product and services in traditional sense, but active investigators, producers, and message creators as their voice spread easily in minutes and have potential to influence many consumers’ purchase decisions accordingly. Thus, I believe the word best describes this new type of consumers would be “voicing consumers” or hence the combination of these two words “voicesumers.” Voicesumers, the loudest consumers we’ve ever witnessed in the marketing history.

References 1. Allison, K. Neil. 1978. A Psychometric Development of a Test for Consumer Alienation from the Marketplace. Journal of Marketing Research 15 (4): 565–575. 2. Andersen, Trond. 1999. Consumer Power via the Internet. First Monday 4 (1). Available at www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_1/andresen/index. html. 3. Bagozzi, Richard P., and Utpal M. Dholakia. 2002. Intentional Social Action in Virtual Communities. Journal of Interactive Marketing 16 (2): 2–21. 4. Banister, Emma N., and Margaret K. Hogg. 2001. Mapping the Negative Self: From ‘So Not Me’…to ‘Just Not Me’. Advances in Consumer Research 28: 242–248. 5. Cherrier, Helene. 2005. Becoming Sensitive to Ethical Consumption Behavior: Narratives of Survival in an Uncertain and Unpredictable World. Advances in Consumer Research 32: 600–604. 6. Cheung, Anne S.Y. 2014. Revisiting Privacy and Dignity: Online Shaming in the Global E-Village. Laws 3 (2): 301–326. 7. Douglas, David M. 2016. Doxing: A Conceptual Analysis. Ethics and Information Technology 18 (3): 199–210. 8. El-Ansary, A., and W.L. Stern. 1972. Power Measurement in the Distribution Channel. Journal of Marketing Research 9: 47–52.

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9. Feick, Lawrence F., and Linda L. Price. 1987. The Market Maven: A Diffuser of Marketplace Information. Journal of Marketing 51 (1): 83–97. 10. Hagel, John, and Arthur Armstrong. 1997. Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press. 11. Hargittai, Eszter. 2002. Second-Level Digital Divide: Differences in People’s Online Skills. First Monday 7 (4). http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_4/ hargittai/. 12. Hirschman, Albert O. 1970. Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 13. Katyal, Sonia K. 2010. Stealth Marketing and Antibranding: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name. Buffalo Law Review 58: 795–849. 14. Kopp, Steven W., and Tracy A. Suter. 2000. Trademark Strategies Online: Implications for Intellectual Property Protection. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing 19 (1): 119–131. 15. Kucuk, S. Umit, and Sandeep Krishnamurthy. 2007. An Analysis of Consumer Power on the Internet. Technovation 27 (1/2): 47–56. 16. Kucuk, S. Umit. 2008. Consumer Exit, Voice and ‘Power’ on the Internet. Journal of Research for Consumers 15. http://www.jrconsumers.com/aca demic_articles/issue_15,_2008. 17. Kucuk, S. Umit. 2009. Consumer Empowerment Model: From Unspeakable to Undeniable. Direct Marketing: an International Journal 3 (4): 327–342. 18. Kucuk, S. Umit. 2009. The Evolution of Market Equalization on the Internet. Journal of Research for Consumers 16. http://jrconsumers.com/ academic_articles/issue_16,_2009. 19. Kucuk, S. Umit. 2012. Can Consumer Power Lead Market Equalization? Journal of Research for Consumers 21. http://jrconsumers.com/Academic_ Articles/issue_21/S.%20Umit%20Kucuk%20-%20Academic%20Article.pdf. 20. Kucuk, S. Umit. 2015. A Semiotic Analysis of Consumer-Generated Antibranding. Marketing Theory 15 (2): 243–264. 21. Kucuk, S. Umit. 2016. Exploring the Legality of Consumer Anti-branding Activities in the Digital Age. Journal of Business Ethics 139 (1): 77–93. 22. Kucuk, S. Umit. 2016. Consumerism in the Digital Age. Journal of Consumer Affairs 50 (3): 515–538. 23. Legocki, Kimberly V., Kristen L. Walker, and Tina Kiesler. 2020. Sound and Fury: Digital Vigilantism as a Form of Consumer Voice. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing 39 (2): 169–187. 24. Lessig, Lawrence. 1999. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books. 25. Nunziato, C. Dawn. 2000. Exit, Voice and Values on the Net. Berkeley Technology Law Journal 15 (2): 753–776.

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26. Reisch, A. Lucia. 2003. Potentials, Pitfalls, and Policy Implications of Electronic Consumption. Information & Communication Technology Law 12 (2): 93–109. 27. Singh, Jagdip, and Robert E. Wilkes. 1996. When Consumers Complain: A Path Analysis of the Key Antecedents of Consumer Complaint Response Estimates. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 24 (4): 350–365. 28. Smith, Adam. 1776. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: Methuen & Co (Book IV, Chapter 8, 49). 29. Toffler, Alvin. 1980. The Third Wave: The Classic Study of Tomorrow. New York, NY: Bantam. 30. Trottier, Daniel. 2017. Digital Vigilantism as Weaponisation of Visibility. Philosophy & Technology 30 (1): 55–72. 31. Wilk, Richard R. 1997. A Critique of Desire: Distaste and Dislike in Consumer Behavior. Consumption, Markets and Culture 1 (2): 175–196.

CHAPTER 3

Voicesumers

Abstract This chapter defines the proposed new form of consumer conceptualized as “voicesumer.” The chapter classifies and defines various types of voicesumers, we are witnessing in today’s dynamically chancing digital and social environments. The chapter introduces three new types of consumer voices: Boisterous, Vociferous, and finally Obstreperous voices with anecdotes and cases. The chapter provides a comparative analysis of newly proposed consumer voices in order to distinguish such voices’ potentials to effect on consumer perception of entertainment, attention, credibility, and hate seeding components. Finally, the chapter discusses on how such voices operate within today’s markets by analyzing the audience, message, and channel of message usage. Keywords Voicesumers · Boisterous voice · Vociferous voice · Obstreperous voice · Audience · Message

Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder. —Rumi

Most of the cases, what you said defines who you are. It is reflection of your personality as well as society’s value system. Thus, voice is not only sheer communication tool where issues passed from one to another, but also is a “definitional” communication tool where you define your identity and personality with the others. We are all the product of the society © The Author(s) 2020 S. U. Kucuk, Consumer Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53983-2_3

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we are living in. In today’s modern world, even machines and computers are designed with specific cultural preferences. Thus, most of the time, sender’s way of creating and deploying the message to the possible recipient can also reflect the culture of the sender belong. Thus, every sign and tool used is also the reflection of sender’s cultural background and requires deep socio-cultural analysis as well. In many cases, voice is a very rich in terms of carrying sender’s beliefs, feelings, and biases of the sociocultural environment where sender belongs to or surrounded to. When you realize that when you look at the cardboard says “vet needs a job” aim at patriotic citizens driving by who might feel guilty that that guy dedicated his life for them and now he needs a help. Or “single mom needs help” sign reflects the socio-economic problems many single mothers are going through in this country, and that some other single mom associates herself with and donate some money. Socio-cultural elements and problems are always embedded into voice. Thus, voice is more socially oriented concept and sometimes indicates a social stand-up (rise), and in some cases, it might also be used as an indication of revolutionary movement. It is a socially oriented concept because it requires participation, resistant, and show off existential power of being there. Without existence of voice, there will be no social or economic progress as every society is fed by ideas, opinions, and new thoughts that focus on solutions and pushes societies’ innovativeness to strength individuals and social welfare. If you cut such a feeding tube, you will eventually be dealing with a social entropy or a slowly dying society. From sociopolitical point of view, voice is a great social equalizer as it provides equal chances to each citizen to exercise their participatory rights such as voting and protesting [19]. Without individual’s democratic participation and equalization of the voice to share ideas and complaints with society, there will be no social order established in which society as whole can respect and follow. This is the very essence of the freedom of speech and expression where it is entitled as the first amendment of the constitution. No matter how much disturbing the ideas get or reverse your individual value system, every individual should be free to voice their concerns as such voice is the reflection of the society’s reality. This also guarantees that no one single individual can change or impact the outcomes of society unless they have given or delegated the power to do so by the society. From this point of view, protection of individual voice eventually guarantees the society’s well-being. Thus, it is essential to be able to reach masses and hear from them. Although this seems very hard tack to do, the recent smartphone

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revolution made is easier to reach millions in a speed of light. With smartphones, it is now possible to raise your voice wherever and whenever possible. A survey found that majority of people check their smartphone before even leaving their beds in the morning [22]. The same survey reports that majority look at their mail and social media accounts first thing when they wake up. Interestingly enough, we also browse our social media feeds until we fall asleep in the bed as well [23]. It seems we spend all of our times with our smartphones as we want to hear what others saying or if anybody is listening us. Even we can bring these machines with us into our sleep and our dreams if it is possible. Thus, smartphones are indispensable part of our lives. As if they are part of our body. Perhaps the feeling of catching up with everybody and every event all the time makes us attach to these machines. We are sometimes in the digital space filled with fantasy and some other times in the physical world trying to be us. There are times we have difficulty to adopt the physical world’s reality or vice versa. This also makes us feel like we are stuck between the physical and digital world of ours. We use the digital world as substitute of our physical world, but most of the time they are not substitutable. The interchange between these two worlds has fundamental effect on the way we behave, communicate, and hence the way we raise our voice. If you sit back at a bench and do some people watching in a city corner, you will surprise to see that almost everybody is doing the same thing: walking their heads down and punching something on the little screens of their smartphones without even looking at what is ahead of them. As if, tacitly, something was directing them to their destinations on the streets while they are catching up to do in the digital world. Some accidently hit each other, or even worse, street signs or garbage cans. Feels like people replaced their brain with their phones or carrying their brains in their hands all the time. We used to hear with our ears and voice our ideas or complaints with sounds created in our vortex. Nowadays, we hear with our eyes through our smartphones’ screens and raise our voice with our fingers through our smartphones’ keyboards. Even though our brains still send the orders but this time we have a mediator in this process: our smartphones. As if our smartphones are competing with our brains. That is the major dilemma every voicesumer is going through today. Although some uses their ears to hear, they cannot hear me because they are all plugged up with their earbuds and headphones. You cannot even say hi to anybody anymore on the street. We do not verbalize our

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greetings anybody, we, instead, digitalize our greetings and feelings by sending various emojis after the fact. As if we are physically here but constantly living in other dimensions in which noise and voice are more silently noisy and hence more than just a physical sound. This is the transformation of human voice in today’s world, perhaps in a more enriching way. As if a new form of human beings has been evolved, which I called in one of my studies [10] as “homodigitus” who lives and creates new form of realities and life forms in the digits of our constantly evolving our civilization by raising their voice or listening and learning from others on the net. For example, these days, when people get angry with each other or yelling each other in different ways, not even physically yelling. One says to other “why were you so angry to me the other day.” The defendant answer, “No, I was not angry with you. I didn’t even use capital letters in my text.” It was easy to figure who is angry with you in physical world as you hear that angry and loud voice from the source. There was also a real risk that you can end up in hospital or in jail. But this is not the case in the digital spaces as you can easily escape from the fight whenever you want and as nobody can find you, touch you or beat you. So, you can raise your voice as much as you want and scream as much as you want with your capital letters in the digital world since you know nobody will come over where you are and do the unexpected. Because there is a security of not receiving real-time and impulsive physical responses in the digital world, and that increases the chances of raising your voice easily. Thus, the format and frequency of raising voice changed and most of the time left to our imagination in the digital world as we can’t know exactly what/how the other person doing in the physical world. This also increases our prejudice as we wrongly evaluate the psyche of the person in 140 characters in Tweeter or between the line in our text messages. So, the question is: How can you be loud, noisy, silent, or angry in digital world? Or how can I be sure about the person’s emotional stage and feelings when I am talking with him/her? Is he/she angry with me or just having fun or is it just friendly teasing? Clearly, voicing is getting easier and that stimulate even the most silent people to say something in the digital world. But there are new rules, symbols, or emojis to use when you raise your voice in this new era. You want to yell somebody or want to tell that you are angry, you use all capital letters or use exclamation marks excessively at the end of your sentence or use of angry face emojis. Once you hooked up by this new

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reality, you cannot stop reflecting your emotions and your voice through these little electronic machines holding in your hand. It is easy, and it is way better than yelling or shouting to someone in digital world rather than physical world. This also makes it easier to get angry or yell someone in digital world as falsely feel like nobody can physically see you screaming in your screen in your room, office, or wherever. The voice we knew is transformed in a new form. Even though we do not physically hear the literal voice, we heard voices in our screens and hence in our minds. We are wired with various emotions and as if we are holding a button in our hands to push anytime to release the emotional pressure in our brains and minds to voice those emotions. Thus, we have happiness buttons in our fingertips, and whenever we want to be happy, we push those little buttons in our smartphones to hear from somebody we love who fills our hearts with happiness. Or watch a video or listen to music that put us on a mood. We are replacing our physical reality with digital ones in a very addictive manner. As if no control over what we say or what we do as we feel to be entitled to make comments about every single event weather matter to use or not. We can hide who we are and can be anybody we want to be and experiment our multiple identities and personalities in this world, and hence voice different from ourselves. It seems we are creating a new schizophrenic world by testing our hidden and undiscovered selves. It used to socially be unacceptable to get in a verbal fight with someone in the street. We are getting addictive to our phones which are like little sponges suck our reality and our lives [17, 18]. Our smartphones are this century’s new dopamine source. A research conducted with more than a thousand Americans revealed that 71% of participants sleep with their smartphones, and 35% of them first thing they do in the morning is grabbing their smartphones [24]. In fact, most of us check our phones every other minute to make sure that we are not missing out anything. When we get upset or bored, we immediately pull our smartphones and take a ride to the unknown. Or, we pour our emotions, justified or not, to these little machines we hold in our hands, without realizing that many places we are in are actually public places so everybody can see how you feel and what you do. We do not care sharing our stories with strangers anymore as long as we are heard. We just want to be heard. We are so much so addicted that some of us cannot even imagine a life without smartphones and constant connection to the Internet. Thus, this addition also brings the fear of

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not having our smartphones with us all the time. This fear is recently defined as “Nomophobia” (no-mobile-phone phobia) [9]: “discomfort or anxiety when out of mobile phone (MP) or computer contact. It is the fear of becoming technologically incommunicable, distant from the MP or not connected to the Web” [9, p. 52]. A survey also found that about 66% of adults suffer Nomophobia in the United States [25]. A recent research defined the dimensions of Nomophobia as (1) not being able to instantly get in touch and communicate with people, (2) losing connectedness to one’s own identity in the social media, (3) not being able to access information available on the Internet, and finally, (4) giving up conveniences provided by the smartphones [21]. This, in turn, indicates that we are actually more addicted to the feeling of being connected, or to a most human thing: a social touch. Smartphones are just tools. As if we want to say “hey, I am here, too. See me! Hear me!” all the time. Most of us are online and willing to post something and try to be a part of something, hopefully better and bigger than us. As if we are keeping our online diary of our lives publicly. We are posting everything at any time it is either related or unrelated, necessary or unnecessary, important or unimportant, with a content or without a content, just to be able to make a mark and receive some reply to confirm that we are part of the pack and hence we are exist, accepted, and perhaps loved. This, I believe, makes us more addictive to our or others voice. It seems we are getting addicted to raise a voice more and more everyday as we cannot take a break from texting, posting pictures, information or opinions to raise our voice and hear what others have to say. Thus, we are getting addicted to hear from someone (no matter who, as long as he/she connect with us in a spiritual level) willing to listen us. In other words, we are “voice addictive” (or voicedictive) that is the fundamental fabric of today’s consumer voicesumers . As a result, voicesumer can be defined as a person who is in need of constant voicing his/her voice or hearing from others about various social, personal and market-related issues, either positive or negative way. In this context, everybody can be voicesumer in today’s dynamically changing digital world as there are very limited entry barriers to the digital world of ours. A voicesumer can insert himself easily into any conversations as he/she feels the urge of voicing his/her comments in the digital world through his/her real or digital identities. Although you can be a quiet person in real time, you can be really noisy and loud voicesumer in the digital platforms. There is always someone out there willing

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to listening you either they agree or disagree with you. In other words, there is no silence anymore in today’s digital world as opposed to in physical worlds. And that, I believe, is sometimes enriching but other times exhausting thing for many of us.

Types of Voicesumers Voicesumers can reveal him/herself in various forms in markets. They can be perceived as boisterous, vociferous, or worst obstreperous. Although boisterous individuals are seen noisy, uncontrolled, and loud, their energy and cheerful attitudes can have positive impact on receivers. But this does not work out the same way for vociferous individuals. Vociferous has more rebellious, confrontational, and negative impact on receivers. Vociferous indicates forceful and loud aggressive resistance against whatever voicer believes in. Thus, vociferous has a stronger meaning as indicates being offensive and protesting. There is more criticism, fight, and resistance against any issues bother vociferous. This fight against unbelieved and unfortunate event requires more noise in vociferous mind so that he/she can attract all the others’ attention to this important event. In this context, I think vociferous indicates outcry caused by dissatisfaction while boisterous indicates generally energic and loud people not from dissatisfaction but also joy. In some form, vociferous can be defined as Young Turk of consumers. Obstreperous, on the other hand, is a very aggressive, unruly, and noisy person. Obstreperous can easily fall into pray of his own ego and impulses and hence can react in a less thought-out perspective and can even represent things different than what original happens. Obstreperous could be hold hostage by his own ego and attacks everybody on his/her way even some self-created enemies in his/her own world. This, in turn, gave a birth more violent, unruly and uncontrollable voice of obstreperous. A child-like mind voice created with various forms of tantrums. Although boisterous can be perceived as more positive and entertaining, vociferous can be seen as more critical and middleof-the-road type of person. Obstreperous is the most negative of all. Yet, there are also some similarities between boisterous, vociferous, and obstreperous. They are not hesitant to voice their disagreements and agreements. They all fight for others’ attention. When they all come together, they reach ultimate noise both literal and mind noise as also depicted in Fig. 3.1. We, as consumers, could also individually carry all of these three types of voices with different degrees. In other words, one

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Vociferous

Boisterous

Noise

Obstreperous

Silence

Fig. 3.1 Types of voicesumers, noise, and silence

could be boisterous, vociferous, and obstreperous in various degrees. But one of these three eventually dominate to others and our ultimate voice is shaped. Therefore, the discussion of each type of voicesumer can help us to understand what voicesumer is and hence provide a better descriptive perspective. For that purpose, I decided to do some search on the Internet. I decided to use keywords “boisterous,” “boisterous person,” and “boisterous voice” in Google searches. All I found was the definition of “boisterous person.” However, when I tried Google Images with the same search keywords, I started to see the persons who are boisterous in our society. Thus, I used Google Images to find the society’s most boisterous, vociferous, and obstreperous individuals.1 I went through at all the images to wed down the person who most likely to fit this definition. The search results put a list of 400 images and pictures of each keyword. After cleaning a lot of cartoons and wall quotes from various philosophers about the keywords I used, I found the

1 All the related searches are conducted through Google Images in July 2019.

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Table 3.1 Frequency of person appearances in Google Images searches Boisterous Robin Williams Donald Trump Barack Obama Ed Helmes Usain Bolt Jerry Lewis

Times 16 11 4 2 1 1

Vociferous John McCain Donald Trump John Boehner Andrew Cuomo Orrin Hatch Tulsi Gabbard

Times 20 15 3 2 2 1

Obstreperous Donald Trump Bernie Sanders Rick Atkinson Boris Johnson Kamala Harris Dick Cheney

Times 15 2 2 1 1 1

pictures of most frequently repeated pictures of the individuals who can fit the definition of boisterous or vociferous or obstreperous person at the end of each search result. The result of these searches is reported in Table 3.1. Thus, my search method gave fruitful results. Among all these names, there was one name constantly repeated more than any other, and that was “Robin Williams” for boisterous voice, and “John McCain” for vociferous voice and “Donald Trump” for obstreperous voice. On the other hand, if you look at the results carefully, you will see that Donald Trump name appears in every search result and mostly listed in the top. This can be interpreted that he might be the noisiest person in the society as he perfectly fits the “noise” spot at the cross-sections of all voice types pictured in the Fig. 3.1. Clearly, these names that were appeared in this time might change next time we run the same search tools. This is because Google Images are sensitive to events happening at the time of searches; thus, we could see new boisterous, vociferous, and obstreperous individuals in the eye of public.

Boisterous: A Joyful Ride Boisterous voice is one of the most fun and joyful voice you can ever hear. It is generally a very positive, cheerful, and animated voice. I am sure everybody met some boisterous person in their lives, but I wonder who the best representation of boisterous voice would be. Although all the other names could fall in boisterous person definition, Robin Williams was perfect definition of this concept as I believe most of us can define Robin Williams as very boisterous and joyful person.

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The characters Robin played in his career are all very extraordinary and loud individuals. Robin was a person you feel like to be programed to be loudly funny and joyful all the time. He made all of us happy, yet we, as public, have never known about his struggles which took him from us eventually. I cannot forget the first time I saw in one of the famous late-night talk shows. He was full of energy that he can’t even sit in his chair more than 10 seconds and keep jumping up to the host’s table and imitating some sort of imaginary person, animal, or some sorts of alien from different galaxies. He was very imaginary, entertaining, energic, and pushing you to think differently and absurdly. As an audience, you have no way of losing your focus when you are watching him in the tube as he always takes you a new adventure all the time. I can see even the host realized that he/she has no control over Robin Williams, whatever the subject is, Robin was the center of the show. Everybody was waiting what kind of totally blown away thing he will do. You feel like you are not watching a laid-back adult conversation, rather you are experiencing Robin Williams’ imaginary, creatively funny, and joyful adventures. You feel like you are watching a totally new movie in the tube directed by Robin. Sometimes he can get very loud in order to synchronize various elements of story he is telling, and that in fact makes you jump from your chair. You feel like he is living the story he is telling, seems not planned, and appears very natural. You get the feeling that he has no secret agenda or a calculated action behind his voice. You know that he is totally a genuine guy and hence earns your attention. It is always joyful to watch him, jumping from one character to another in an ordinary conversation. He was loud in his personification and imitations, but you do not think that he was loud because he always puts smile on your face at the end. I do not think I have ever seen him serious in any conversations. But that does mean that he is not trying you teach something or just wasting your time. You learn things from him at the least expected time. You always get some sort of “aha moments” with him as he reels you into a new dimension and makes you see things from a totally new perspective. At the end, you always have memorial moments with Robin. Thus, I believe he perfectly fits boisterous voice and person’s definitions rightfully as evidenced by the Google Images search results. Boisterous voice has the potential to convince you while entertaining. Nowadays, many companies need consumer online communities to communicate with their consumers. As a business owner, you would

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probably want your message to reach more people with maximum effectiveness. Imagine you have a couple of Robin Williams are promoting your product with boisterous voices at every corner of the markets. It is highly possible that your products get a high share of consumer attention and awareness. Boisterous consumer voice and message can be very effective as it comes from a genuine consumer, not tricky marketer. In other words, the message is consumer-generated, genuine, and heart-to-heart communication, unlike marketer-generated messages that directly target your wallet. Such frank and boisterous voice can eventually reach every consumer’s wallet through their hearts and minds. Part of the reason, these consumers believe in your product, and as a message receiver, you can easily detect this honest effort. You have always some question in your mind that the marketer who is trying to influence you is paid to do this and hence not genuine. This dilemma has a bigger impact in digital markets as the authenticity of voice is always in question as we do not know which message is paid or which one is genuine. We are living in a misinformation and disinformation age in the digital markets; hence, boisterous voice is much more needed than before. Every consumer deserves a joyful ride.

Vociferous: Imperial Has No Clothes Vociferous is not scared to tell the truth and ready to raise his/her voice to complain and correct what is believed to be wrong from moral and societal point of views. He is the only brave one to tell you the truth no matter what. If you are naked and everybody lives in an illusion than you are not, he will be the first one to tell you that you are, in fact, naked and fooled like everybody else. Correctness is the core value of vociferous person and his voice. If he needs to rock to both face the truth and challenge the groupthink, then he will do it. Vociferous person has courage to stand against what he believes is wrong even though it might cost him emotionally or even he knew that it disadvantages him. This kind of voice is needed as they function like a control mechanism in any society, organization, or group. As indicated in Table 3.1, the best personification of vociferous person turns out to be Senator John McCain. The search results make very sense as Senator McCain was very well known with his strong voice and wellstructured arguments especially when the nation deviates from the truth

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and our fundamental values. One of the simple examples of his vociferousness is his remarks he made during Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal. In 2004, US news outlets aired a news that US-led coalition troops involved torture and abuse of detainees in Abu Ghraib prison. During that time, society and main media were still struggling emotional aftershocks of 9/11, and some believed that torture is okay including the major decision makers in the administration. As a former POW (prison of war) during Vietnam War, he knew very well what it means being held prison and tortured, but most importantly, he knew American culture so deep so that he couldn’t stop himself and told reporters that what is doing in Abu Ghraib is wrong, and whoever behind these human rights abuses should be punished. He probably knew that that could not be a smart move politically considering the emotional atmosphere of the country. But he did it in anyway. I can’t forget the day he said: “folks this is not about them, it is about us” [26]. It means we don’t torture in any circumstances as this brings a moral darkness to our society. Senator McCain later run for president. During a town hall meeting, one of his supporters asked him if his opponent Barack Obama is Arab, and hence he is American. The questioner was about to continue her loaded questions, but Senator McCain grabbed the microphone from his supporter and said “No, ma’am. No, ma’am. He is a decent, family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign is all about. He’s not” [27]. Defending your opponent in the middle of presidential campaign cannot be seen as a smart strategic move. But he did it in anyway even though he knew that it was not for his benefit. Perhaps everybody was expecting him to say that “yes, the emperor has clothes.” But he did not. The civility he brought to the campaign with his vociferous voice still resonates with many. Vociferous people tend to challenge the system, and more importantly what is introduced to them as truth. They have strong philosophic ground and sense of justice. And most of the time, they provide more analytical and informative answers to the issues. Today, we are also witnessing vociferous consumer voices and complaints in the markets, and majority of companies are ignoring such voices. However, vociferous consumers can be your best information source as they provide very vital feedback to companies. These consumers can also be associated with “prosumers” even though they do not directly involve in business and product development processes unlike prosumers. Vociferous people’s voice can be used

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in the development of blueprints for business and product processes as in some instances they know your business and products as much as you do. Their advanced sensibility to correctness and passion to raise their voice when they see the wrong can be used as an early warning system when company is developing both products and business philosophy. In public domain, vociferous consumers’ voice can reduce perceived risks by other consumers and hence help the company to develop market trust. Thus, vociferous consumers can be very helpful during the introduction of a new product to the markets and public relations crisis if you think you were misunderstood or attacked by a disinformation campaign.

Obstreperous: Twitter Tantrums Obstreperous voice is aggressive and uncontrollable voice that is often associated with noise. It is not a kind of voice you want to hear every day. Obstreperous voice indicates resistance to anything that has the potential to restrain people either justified or not. In this sense, it sounds similar to vociferous, but obstreperous acts with impulses and emotions not with logic and involves very aggressive behaviors such as verbal attacks, swearing, public shaming, and bullying; not sound logical and philosophical perspectives. If vociferous’ goal is to protest or fight for others who are scared to raise their voice, obstreperous’ goal is to create chaos and some instances emotional destruction and perhaps hate. That eventually makes obstreperous the nosiest and perhaps the most disturbing voice ever. Obstreperous voice is like a ballistic missile lost in the space and flies uncontrollably and nobody knows where the rocket finally hit. Thus, there could be a lot of unintended consequences of this kind of voice. There is also some narcissistic view in this voice as it does not take any blame on anything going on around him/her and more prone to hate [12]. In other words, they attribute the blame in external factors not themselves, and the research revealed that the greater the external attribution is, the more likely they will voice and in fact the louder they get [3, 15, 16]. The best representation of obstreperous voice in our society turns out to be Donald Trump. He got the highest frequency calculated in the obstreperous person search results as also indicated in Table 3.1. Interestingly enough, there were overwhelming numbers of children’s pictures that depict baby tantrums, baby screams, throwing, etc., in the result of Google Images search for obstreperous person. This also indicates that

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our society sees obstreperous person as childish individuals who make lots of noise without making any conscious points. Donald Trump’s constant usage of Twitter in every opportunity made him named as “Twitter President” as he sends angry twits at any time about anything at anyone. He is so addicted to this kind of messaging. We all know what time he wakes up from his twitting habits. Main media and public anticipate his tweets with excitement to see who the hated person of the day is or who he would be attacking today. He cannot stay quiet even though he knows some of his tweets get back to him and bite him even during the House Impeachment Trials [28]. Thus, it will not be wrong to classify him as voicedictive. He has millions of followers in Twitter, but most importantly, he is always on the news whenever he leashes out his controversial views to the public. His aids constantly try to justify his behaviors and defend him by saying that “it is not Donald Trump, it is social media” or things like “these are his own ideas and not official WH (White House) policies,” or “the president likes to connect with American people through Twitter.” Nevertheless, he is instantly changing the media’s focus, discussions, and views of millions of people in the country. He has millions of lovers and haters, perhaps more haters than lovers. Perhaps most of the Americans try to ignore him and escape from his anger tantrums as they feel uncomfortable with his unconstructive messages and verbal attacks that fit in hundred and forty characters. Not only American public get the news at first hand from those tweets but also government officials as well. We learn who is fired or if any major policy shifts in the government from his Twitter, not through official WH press announcements. Thus, the media gets the news from those twits with public at the same time. He does not own a media company or TV channels but sitting at the WH with his smartphone in his hand and changing the discussions in the country with a short tweet at a time. Mostly, in a negative way by personally attacking his opponents or even celebrities, he had political differences with him. It seems his tweets like bullets fired from Twitter gun and aimed at to hit somebody at the target, but nobody wants to stand in front of it and get hit. Many commentators look at those angry hundred and forty characters and analyze his mindset and diagnose his psychology disorders in order to figure out what he is thinking or planning to do next. In some point, the whole country start playing guess games to figure out what would be shocking news of the day. Perhaps, his ability to access to nuclear codes is not a concern anymore (as it was before the election), but his usage

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of Twitter is a concern especially considering sociologic damage and divisiveness created with his tweets in the country. It is ironic to see that we are not worried about his access to the nuclear codes anymore but his access to his smartphone right now. I see some politicians saying, “get that damn telephone from his hand and lock it somewhere that we can’t reach!” as if a father tells his wife to take the toys away from kids so that they stop hitting the walls and damage them. Thus, the real responsibility of WH employees should be hiding Trump’s smartphone so that he cannot create political turmoil and social unrest in the country anymore. This is typical obstreperous voice. On the other hand, some analysts believe that he is purposely creating these kinds of obstreperous messages to test his reach and influence. He has years of marketing experience as a business owner and TV personality and hence he perhaps knows how to use this kind of messaging to control society’s pulse or push them to the edge when he wants to. It seems the most important element for him to create shock value. It does not matter whether his message is true or not, the most important thing is if he can perk your attention and pulls you in his world. He makes unfounded, false, and misleading claims more than any of his predecessor [29]. Thus, the joy of getting realized is more important than the correctness of his messages. Obstreperous voice is a voice begs for attention since it is more impulsive as well as misleading. That naturally explains why I saw too many screaming and shouting kid pictures in my Google Images search. Because they make obstreperous noises so that they can get some attention from their parents. There are also obstreperous consumer voices in digital markets that create quite a lot of noise and confusion. Perhaps, many of them seeding hate and dividing the markets into pieces without knowing it. Obstreperous voice is difficult to handle and to control especially in the digital age as it is almost impossible to verify every claim made online. Everybody is enjoying their first amendment rights, but that does not mean that you can attack everybody you don’t like with false and misleading claims. That is this century’s one of the major problems. There is a no robust system that can differentiate bad apples from good ones or verify every claim made in markets. Many of us are sometimes making our decision with wrong or misleading information available in the markets. The recent Russian meddling of 2016 US presidential election is a good example of the problem. Obstreperous voice hunts for attention not for truth or logical convictions, and hence, companies as well as individuals

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should always be alerted to see who is saying what about you so that they can challenge such obstreperous voices in a factual and sometimes in a legal way. Although such follow-ups can help you to understand the cause of obstreperousness, it cannot guarantee that you will somehow correct such unfounded and misleading claims in the public eyes. Reputation management is everything now, and it is much easier to throw dirty anybody in the digital spaces until humanity determined to develop a much more needed detection and verification systems for the sake of social justice.

Comparative Analysis of Voicesumers Although I discussed the features of these three typical voice types separately, it would also be helpful to discuss their differences in a comparative perspective. We are all somewhere between obstreperous and vociferous and boisterous continuum in different circumstances and context. Some of us use cautiously negative voice and get vociferous or some others go extreme and get viciously negative like obstreperous while some others stay more boisterous and hence have a positive voice. Thus, although we are all trying to say similar things, some of us want to build meaning through communicating negatively while some others build through positively. Or some others prefer to stay in the middle. For example, there are very small meaning shifts if I say, “My car is okay” or “My car is good” (a positive differentiation) or “My car is not bad” (negative differentiation). Although both sentences are slightly different, they perhaps define almost the same or similar thing. The first sentence would probably be perceived more boisterous than the second one even though some might think that these are all describing almost the same or similar thing. The potential misunderstandings are created by how people decode the message. The negative differentiation emphasized in the second sentence might have more impact on people’s perception when they are evaluating the same or similar thing. On the other hand, if we use the positive differentiation, I can also elevate people’s expectations, and thus that potentially inflated expectation can easily turn to dissatisfaction. This indicates how the same or similar things can be represented by different types of voices differently. Thus, comparison of the different voices in various conditions and/or under effect of different factors is a necessity to understand voicesumers ’ real potentials.

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Entertainment

Attention

Credibility Hate Seeding

-

+ Obstreperous

Vociferous

Boisterous

Fig. 3.2 Vociferous, obstreperous, and boisterous voices

As pictured in Fig. 3.2, obstreperous voice has a more negative and uncontrollable nature compared to vociferous and boisterous voices when all things been equal. Boisterous voice has more positive focus than any other voice types mentioned here. Vociferous voice can equally be positive and negative as such voice is mostly fed by relative logical and moral value systems rather than emotions. Thus, vociferous voice can fall on both positive and negative perspectives depending on the truth. In this context, it can be said that obstreperous voice has less entertaining value than both vociferous and boisterous voices, but this might change depending on who the audience is. Since boisterous consumers generate more positive voice and significant amount of value for the company through WOM (word-of-mouth), boisterous voice might create more consumer engagement. When there are more energic, illustrative, passionate, and boisterous consumers in social networks and online communities, followers might have a better chance to experience positive events or want to see the positive side. We all experienced these kinds of individuals who are positive all the time and immediately jump into conversation with sound and genuine suggestions for others, cheer us, and help us to move to positivity. Thus, this voice can be perceived entertaining as also indicated with blue line in Fig. 3.2. Thus, having boisterous consumers are talking good things about you can help you to get positive

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public’s attention and hence get your message admired and accepted. This could be true for both friendly and unfriendly audience of boisterous. Both boisterous and obstreperous voices are effective in creating attention as they are more distinctive than vociferous. As indicated by Craig [2, p. 145] “A distinct sociocultural “voice” can be heard.” The main reason is also such voices are all upbeat and high in emotions, either positive or negative, as also indicated with red line in Fig. 3.2. Thus, if you need to get people’s attention in this attention economy, you need to use tone of either boisterous or obstreperous voices. These voices first drill into the receiver’s mind especially where the attention can be considered as the scarcest source. The best way to cut through such constantly flowing information is to use either boisterous or obstreperous voices, but preferably more boisterous than obstreperous as people might respond positive voice better than negative voice. More importantly, positive first impression can stay longer than negative one. Vociferous can also grab receivers’ attention, but not the level of boisterous and obstreperous. Once the attention is gained with these two voice types, then source can shift to more vociferous mode to continue to conversation and influence your audience. However, you might implement vociferous voice in order to challenge or lower the value of obstreperous and boisterous voices in the public eye. That brings more credibility and trust to your voice and yourself when you need it. Thus, any communication attempts start with boisterous and obstreperous voices can be successful creating attention and can be used as very effective tool to cut through the information clutter, but later voicer should focus on vociferous perspective to feed the source with the right information. Both boisterous and obstreperous voices can also be perceived as fake or untrustworthy as it can be easy to fake these extreme emotions just to get consumers’ attention. In this context, it can be said that vociferous voice is the most credible voice as indicated with the green-colored concave credibility line in Fig. 3.2. Vociferous mission is challenging the truth and pulls the receivers’ attention into a higher logical ground even though it can get negative ones in a while. In this context, the vociferous consumer voice is the key to reach better consumer-company relationship perhaps in service/product recovery attempts. Furthermore, obstreperous voices can generate more anxiety and perhaps anger in the society than any other voices discussed here. Obstreperous voice can be very aggressive and carry some hate agenda with shocking claims and negative exaggerations. This might work in

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obstreperous followers, and perhaps sometimes even regular and logical people could not resist to perk their ears to this voice, this voice can plant the seed of hate in the social system you are living in. Part of the reason we, human beings, perceive negative events more important than it actually is [5] and negative event stays with us longer than positive events [4, 6]. Thus, we all hold biases toward negative events (aka “negativity bias”) as we weight negativity more than positivity in our decisions [7, 8]. Thus, obstreperous leaves emotional impact on an unfriendly audience through negativity while entertaining his/her friendly audience with such negativity. This is a “win-win” situation for obstreperous, but I think it would be better to call this “win-sin” situation as obstreperous can find pleasure in this negativity in a very wicked and reprehensible way. Although vociferous voice can have potential to generate some negative reactions from both sides, some people would have hard time to accept the reality and prefer to attack the vociferous because of his/her brutally honest language. Even though we somewhat accept the truth and acknowledge the reality, we just do not want to hear that, and we simply hate the messenger for that reason. Either we shoot the messenger or not, vociferous have potential to create mild hate in this sense. On the other hand, boisterous voice is the least likely to generate hate and probably the most loved and admired voice because of its optimistic and amusing approach to everything. Yet, its impact on audience in an emotional level might not be the level of obstreperous voice. It is clear that boisterous voice has very limited capacity to hate seeding as also indicated with black line in Fig. 3.2. Clearly, each type of voice has their own purpose and appeals to different types of emotions in different circumstances. Both boisterous and obstreperous voices place in the opposite sides of the emotional continuum. These voices can sometimes be misleading as they appeal to our emotions rather than our logic. The most balanced voice seems vociferous compared to other voice types.

Operationalization of Voicesumers At this point, it is necessary to analyze how voicesumers function and operate to reach effective results. In communication theory, every communication process has three distinct components: audience, message, and channel or channel of message [11]. Audience simply indicates who are willing to hear from the voicesumer while message indicates

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content or feature of the voice used. The channel discusses how voicesumer reaches his/her audience. Thus, the power of a voice is depended on existence of an audience who is receptive or interested in your message that comes from a specific communication channel. Otherwise, voice has no value and is wasted. For example, think about a beggar on the street is voicing his/her problems out to you by holding a message written in a cardboard. Some of the most memorable I saw in traffic are “single mom needs help,” “vet needs a job,” “works for anything,” and “need money to go back home.” If the person knows where and when to hold the cardboard message every morning to gain your attention, he/she will have a better chance to raise his/her voice and hence convince you to donate money. You need to know which corners of the city traffic get heavy and slow so that he/she can increase the chances to be recognized. The visibility of bagger’s message should reach you at the right time at the right place. Further, the content of the message should be catchy to reach higher awareness. The harder the message hits drivers emotionally, the more likely the driver will open windows and donate money to the beggar. You, as a driver, decide to donate money in a split of second to a total stranger who is standing in the corner when you are driving by. Thus, the beggar needs to reflect his/her own reality in a couple of words to be heard. His/her survival highly depends on being at the right place at the right time with right message for the right people. On the other hand, sometimes you find yourself questioning whether the story or the message which is narrowed down in a simple cardholder with a couple of words that you saw for a couple of seconds in a morning traffic is true or is a scam. Perhaps, the story was exaggerated, and thus, the stranger is just trying to manipulate your emotions to get money from you. Many of you just do not want to give away money as you do not know if the beggar is trying to get money for food or for another reason that you cannot support. Clearly, you have no way to go back and run a background check or analyze the cardboard message and question the person to get the bottom of his/her story to make sure that it is not scam. This seems interestingly what exactly we are going through in our digital world these days.

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Audience An effectiveness of voice is depended on if it has an audience and what kind of audience it reaches. Is it friendly or unfriendly audience? If one tries to raise his/her voice to an unknown community, perhaps he/she needs to test these three voices in order to find a voice tone that attracts audience’s attention. If the person is voicing to a like-minded crowd, more vociferous tone could be a good way to start conversation. However, if the person is voicing to a crowd that has opposite view than the person or unfriendly audience, then perhaps boisterous voice might work better as you need to break the ice before sharing your main message with this tough crowd. Boisterous voice could be a strong tool when especially you are dealing with difficult crowd, or a crowd that you feel they are totally different than you are, and they are not positive about your views. The voice has more meaning and healing effects when it is shared. Voice sharing process can eventually generate synergy effects in social communications particularly if the voice is distinct and shares the common goals and problems with the right audience. Although the success of each type of voice is measured whether the voice directly reaches the intended audience or not, it is also measured either the audience shares the voice with others or in fact how many times it is shared with other audiences. Such contagiousness effects are the sign of the power of voice as it goes beyond from the primary social circle and initially intended audience than people who are total stranger to the message creator, voicesumer. In other words, it is necessary to know how far the voice can travel in the society to create an impact. In the end, the more audience a voice reaches, the more powerful and influential it gets, especially in today’s digital era. Sharing has always a suiting and healing effect in various social settings. We share our laughs, hugs, and food with others when we are happy or sad. Most of the time we share our sadness with others to find some peace inside. Searching compassion brings some positivity and perhaps more meaning in our lives. One more time, it is easier to share a boisterous voice with anybody either you think they are like you or not. Positive nature of boisterous can easily be welcomed by many. Sometimes we also share some negative messages about a person, event, or a company with burning revengeful feelings. We just need somebody to tell us that we are right so that we can justify our anger and frustration. Thus, sharing obstreperous voice is simply good for getting confirmation and

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verification of your identity and perhaps your ideologic stand. Both boisterous and boisterous messages have emotional appeals. Recent researches similarly revealed that consumer voices are more likely to be shared and go viral when the message is emotional rather than more demanding and commending [1, 14, 20]. Thus, it is possible that boisterous and obstreperous voices might travel farther than vociferous voices as these voice types both have shocking impact on both friendly and unfriendly crowds. Although vociferous can reach its own audience effectively, it is less likely that it gets viral. Thus, obstreperous and boisterous have always upper hand reaching larger audiences. Message Message is simply the information and meaning that you want to transmit to your audience. Thus, everything that has value for audience such as a word, a sign, a symbol, a picture, or combination of all these semiotic symbols can strengthen the voice if they are understood and moved by the audience. These semiotic and symbolic meanings of message sit at the heart of voice’s soul and should share the same meaning system with audience. If the message cannot share a common ground with an audience’s socio-economic meaning structure, then the voice cannot be voice perhaps will be noise and distortion. There is always a possibility that intended audience cannot value the voice; thus, the voice can be received as distortion or noise if the message is not created shared value systems in mind. Such possible misunderstanding of the meaning gaps between sender’s and recipient’s viewpoints can potentially create a conflict and alienation between both sides. This alienation can potentially generate lack of communication and/or miscommunication between parties which it can eventually lead to a hateful division. Most of the cases, what you said defines who you are. It is reflection of your personality as well as society’s value system. Thus, as expressed at the beginning of this chapter, voice is “definitional” communication tool though individuals define their identities and personalities. We are all the product of the society that we are living in. In today’s modern world, even machines and computers are designed with specific cultural preferences. Thus, most of the time, sender’s way of creating and deploying the message to the possible recipient can also reflect the culture of the sender belongs. Thus, every sign and tool used is also the reflection

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of sender’s cultural background and requires deep socio-cultural analysis as well. In many cases, voice is extraordinarily rich in terms of carrying sender’s beliefs, feelings, and biases of the socio-cultural environment where sender belongs to or surrounded to. You generally know what Robin Williams is going to say, perhaps some funny, imaginary, thoughtful, and out of the world things that he said to us all of his life. Similarly, when you realize that when you look at the cardboard says “vet needs a job” aim at patriotic citizens driving by who might feel guilty that that guy dedicated his life for him/her and now he needs a help. Or “single mom needs help” sign reflects the socio-economic problems many single mothers are going through in this country, and that some other single mom associates herself with that message and donate some money. All the messages I have mentioned here stayed with me because of the power of these messages. The message does not say “I need money” but it says, “vet needs a job” or “single mom needs help.” Put some context to understand what the person is really going through in a small cardboard, so that you can realize them in a split of a second when you are driving in a congested traffic. The stronger the message is, the higher the chance is that you will press your break to stop and help this stranger. Thus, how you phrase your message will eventually determine how long your message will live and how impactful your voice will get. Sometimes the source or the individual who created the voice has less importance than the message itself. In other words, the idea or voice has more power than its creator himself. This is perhaps why I do not remember the person’s face who held the cardboard on the traffic, but I still remember these messages. This also why we met many clever people on the Internet what they say not who they are. Likewise, in today’s digital age, we receive many different messages and videos from various social network members we do not even know, yet we fall into the attractiveness of the ideas or views expressed in those messages. The opposite is true as well. Thus, both boisterous and obstreperous voices have more potential to get contagious as they easily grab your attention. Similarly, we sometimes blindly follow the thoughts of individuals we think that they have better understanding of our lives and today’s realities. This interplay between the power of creator and the power of message eventually determines the power of voice, which eventually determines how far voice can go and how long the voice can exist. In this context, vociferous voice has a better chance to stay exist longer time than boisterous and obstreperous voice as vociferous stands on a factual and truthful ground rather than a couple of minutes of entertainment value.

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Channel of Message Channel of communication tells your way of representing your message to the audience. It indicates the medium you are trying to deliver your message. Think about the veteran I used in my example in this section. If he puts his message in a bigger cardboard, or put some neon light around the cardboard, he will probably attract more attention in the traffic, and perhaps he gets the help he needs sooner than later. If he had a chance to post his message in a roadside billboard, the impact on drivers would be maximum. In fact, some scholars put more importance to channel or medium used in a communication than message and claim that the medium is a separate source of factor other than message [13]. Thus, the medium used to transmit the message to right audience will determine voicesumers ’ success. The medium voicesumer uses the digital media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube rather than traditional communication medium such as TV or radio. Thus, voicesumers ’ power also comes from using uncensored and unfiltered digital media tools unlike traditional media tools. Such digital mediums are also perceived differently by the audiences. A recent research revealed that Facebook is good for emotions, but Twitter is good for assertive and factual content accordingly [14]. In this context, Twitter could be a better place for vociferous as he/she uses factual data and logic while Facebook is perfect for both boisterous and obstreperous voices as their voices have emotional appeals. Perhaps one of the reasons why obstreperous Trump might get into too much trouble since Tweeter might not be the perfect place in which you can unleash too much emotions by unleashing verbal attacks. In this context, it makes sense to see more businesses are promoting in Facebook as users of this digital platform are willing to share informational and emotional content rather than assertive tone of voice [14]. Other digital platforms such as YouTube also attract more humor and emotional appeal and hence would be great platform for boisterous and obstreperous voices. On the other hand, vociferous voice gets more attraction in LinkedIn, which is a professional networking site, as many professionals follow this digital platform for factual thoughts and for professional reasons not for entertainment. Overall, the best voice options could be boisterous and vociferous voices if the voicer wants to reach a communication success. From business point of view, boisterous perhaps better when trying to attract new consumers and dealing with fans while vociferous voice tone would be

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more appropriate when dealing with consumers who have problems with the company in the post-purchase stages. Obstreperous voice should not be recommended in any process with consumers, but it could be easy to detect this kind of voice tone when companies are dealing with their rivals in highly competitive markets. Yet, in social networking sides, some companies prefer to use obstreperous voice when dealing with their haters, but the success of this tone of voice is not guaranteed and in fact it is not recommended when you are dealing with your haters [12]. Clearly, voices in today’s consumers are louder than before. The voices inside consumers’ head seem louder than outside their head especially in this digital age in which voice-empowering technologies are sweeping marketer-generated voice power away and bringing like-minded consumers together. Such technological advancements also enriched and strengthen voicesumers ’ voicing options and his/her ability to communicate with strangers and all others. Voicesumer is a new type and complex consumer and needs to be understood so that we can have a healthy market communication in today’s dynamically changing digital era.

References 1. Carr, Caleb, David Schrock, and Patricia Dauterman. 2012. Speech Acts Within Facebook Status Messages. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 31 (2): 176–196. 2. Craig, Robert T. 1999. Communication Theory as a Field. Communication Theory 9 (2): 119–161. 3. Curren, T.Marry, and Valerie S. Folkes. 1987. Attributional Influences on Consumers’ Desires to Communicate About Products. Psychology & Marketing 4 (1): 31–45. 4. Fossati, Philippe, Stephanie J. Hevenor, Simon J. Graham, Cheryl Grady, Michelle L. Keightley, Fergus Craik, and Helen Mayberg. 2003. In Search of the Emotional Self: An fMRI Study Using Positive and Negative Emotional Words. American Journal of Psychiatry 160 (11): 1938–1945. 5. Glaser, Judith E., and Richard D. Glaser. 2014. The Neurochemistry of Positive Conversations. Harvard Business Review, June 12. https://hbr.org/ 2014/06/the-neurochemistry-of-positive-conversations. Visited on May 15, 2020. 6. Ito, Tiffany A., Jeff T. Larsen, N. Kyle Smith, and John T. Cacioppo. 1998. Negative Information Weighs More Heavily on the Brain: The Negativity Bias in Evaluative Categorizations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75: 887–900.

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7. Kanouse, David, and L.R. Hanson. 1972. Negativity in Evaluations. In Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of Behavior, ed. E. Jones, E. Kanouse, S. Valins, H. Kelley, E. Nisbett, and B. Weiner. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press. 8. Kanouse, David E. 1984. Explaining Negativity Biases in Evaluation and Choice Behavior: Theory and Research. Advances in Consumer Research 11 (1): 703–708. 9. King, S. Anna Lucia, Alexandre M. Valença, and Antonio Egidio Nardi. 2010. Nomophobia: The Mobile Phone in Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia: Reducing Phobias or Worsening of Dependence? Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology 23 (1): 52–54. 10. Kucuk, S. Umit. 2015. Semiotic Analysis of Consumer-Generated AntiBranding. Marketing Theory 15 (2): 243–264. 11. Kucuk, S. Umit. 2016. Visualizing Marketing: From Abstract to Intuitive. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 12. Kucuk, S. Umit. 2019. Brand Hate: Navigating Consumer Negativity in the Digital World, 2nd ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 13. McLuhan, Marshall. 1966. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. 14. Ordenes, Francisco Villarroel, Dhruv Grewal, Stephan Ludwig, Ko De Ruyter, Dominik Mahr, and Martin Wetzels. 2019. Cutting Through Content Clutter: How Speech and Image Acts Drive Consumer Sharing of Social Media Brand Messages. Journal of Consumer Research 45 (5): 988–1012. 15. Richins, L. Marsha. 1983. Negative Word of Mouth by Dissatisfied Consumers: A Pilot Study. Journal of Marketing 47 (1): 68–78. 16. Robertson, Nichola, and Robin N. Shaw. 2005. Conceptualizing the Influence of the Self-Service Technology Context on Consumer Voice. Services Marketing Quarterly 27 (2): 33–50. 17. Russo, Marcello, Massimo Bergami, and Gabriele Morandin. 2018. Surviving a Day Without Smartphones. MIT Sloan Management Review 59 (2): 7–9. 18. Samaha, Maya, and Nazir S. Hawi. 2016. Relationships Among Smartphone Addiction, Stress, Academic Performance, and Satisfaction with Life. Computers in Human Behavior 57: 321–325. 19. Verba, Sidney, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady. 1995. Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 20. Weiger, Welf H., Maik Hammerschmidt, and Hauke A. Wetzel. 2018. Don’t You Dare Push Me: How Persuasive Social Media Tactics Shape Customer Engagement. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 3 (3): 364– 378.

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21. Yildirim, Caglar, and Ana-Paula Correia. 2015. Exploring the Dimensions of Nomophobia: Development and Validation of a Self-Reported Questionnaire. Computers in Human Behavior 49: 130–137. 22. https://www.reportlinker.com/insight/smartphone-connection.html. 23. https://www.techtimes.com/articles/199967/20170302/survey-finds-peo ple-check-smartphones-before-getting-out-bed.html. 24. https://www.dmnews.com/data/news/13055810/american-consumersaddiction-to-smartphones-continues. Visited on April 2020. 25. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/artificial-maturity/201409/ nomophobia-rising-trend-in-students. Visited on April 2020. 26. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-sep-26-na-abuse26-story. html. 27. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/famous-quotes-from-arizonasen-john-mccain/ar-BBMt7Md. 28. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/19/republicans-trump-senatetrial-087344. 29. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/10/presidenttrump-has-made-false-or-misleading-claims-over-days/?noredirect=on.

CHAPTER 4

How to Voice

Abstract This chapter discusses various voicing options for Voicesumers in today’s digital platforms by using anecdotes and cases. The chapter conceptualized Direct and Indirect Consumer Voices by spring boarding traditional consumer complaint literature. Online consumer ratings and reviews as well as electronic WOM (e-Word-of-Mouth) are discussed as newly developing consumer voicing tools. The potential fraudulent use of consumer voice is also discussed. The importance of such voicing tools for consumer voice and market democracy is discussed from business and legal point of views. Keywords Voice response · Negativity bias · Third-party response · Consumer ratings · Consumer reviews · e-WOM

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us. —Friedrich Nietzsche

My son received a birthday present from my sister’s and her family from England: a Lego set. He did not like it, so I went to Amazon website and followed all the necessary return policy steps and I returned it to one of Amazon’s drop-off centers in the area. I thought we could get the new order in a couple of weeks. But I have not heard from Amazon almost one month, and my son naturally started pressing me in every opportunity by © The Author(s) 2020 S. U. Kucuk, Consumer Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53983-2_4

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asking “Dad, when will I get my Legos?” One of the hardest things in this world is perhaps trying to answer your own kid’s never-ending questions when you have no idea how to white lie. So, I had some bad feelings about Amazon as this whole thing was not my own mistake. In my mind, I was giving them time as they might be hammered by staggering number of orders because of the seasons. Legos are very expensive toys, and I definitely didn’t want to lose this precious toy. Otherwise, I would end up buying this expensive toy from my pocket. Thus, I could not hold it back anymore and I decided to give Amazon a call to make sure everything is okay. I talked with three times with Amazon consumer services, and all the time my calls were transferred to somewhere in India. I explained everything to them, yet there was no solution, not even a suggestion of a solution. Nobody knew what was going on. I was about to explode but I wanted to give them one more chance before going to a public rampage or writing an official complaint letter to FCC. Finally, in my last call, somebody heard me and told me that I will receive my refund soon, so that I can go buy the Lego set that my son has long been waiting. Not only that, the customer service representator emailed me a refund bill that shows I will receive extra money in my gift card as an apology. I thought, way the go, Amazon! They, at least, know how to apologize. With that excitement, I started to plan to buy some new toys with the extra money they added to my refunds. Finally, after more than six weeks, I received an email from Amazon, saying that my refunds are transferred to my account and I can go buy whatever I want. I clicked on the link provided by Amazon, and I saw that the amount they told me is not the same amount at all. I got upset but chewed on it thinking that the amount they added to my account in order to apologize was not my money either way. So, I kept my cool, but when I finalized my order at Amazon website, a small window popped up and told me that I need to pay extra for the same price toy with my sister’s first order. At that point, my anger turned out to hate as I felt betrayed over and over again. They should pay me for the misery I went through all this time. I wanted to yell whole world from my lungs to let them know that Amazon sucks. I wanted to go public and challenge Amazon. I felt the urge of voicing my disappointment to everybody. Everybody should see this injustice and side with me to punish this unfair treatment. Maybe someone out there listen to me and stop using Amazon so that the company taste the justice and hence they change their failing practices. I wanted to tell everybody that Amazon is only good times company, not

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the bad times. They just take your money and screw you when you have a problem, or I should say when they have a problem. In fact, they make a little solvable problem bigger than it is every time you ask for their help. I wanted to search some Amazon haters’ website in Facebook or any other digital platform and share my experience with them. Or maybe I should go some review sites and give lowest rating possible and write the nastiest review about their consumer services. But the question is, why was I feeling to share this with everybody and hence voice my disappointment to whole world? Who cares? And most importantly, what would I get by voicing my anger viciously and publicly? I think I needed to voice my disappointment to everyone so that I can find a remedy to ease my pain. I felt such urge of voicing my anger can help me to reduce my negativity and hate I felt toward Amazon. Perhaps I was looking for comfort and wanted to share my emotional wounds with others who might have had the similar experience. They could have known what I am going through. Perhaps, I felt like everybody will see this injustice and support me and join me in punishing Amazon. Or, perhaps, this is so ridiculous that everybody should see this and pad my back and say that “Yes, you were right.” In a way, I need some verification that I was treated badly and unfairly, hence they deserve my hate and revenge, and there is nothing wrong feeling this way. So that I was the normal one, they were the wrong one because they did not keep their promises. As my painful experience reveals, there are various ways of voicing your disappointments and in fact satisfactions to companies and markets. We, consumers, sometimes directly go straight to the company or whoever is at the heart of the problem to voice our complaints and some other times we do this indirectly by talking with some other like-minded consumers hidden from the spots to heel ourselves, perhaps we feel some shame if we complain publicly. And sometimes they use both direct and indirect voices together depending on the urgency and the level of unfairness we perceived. Either way, consumers share their experiences with their close ones, or distance ones to find a comfort or sometimes punish the company by negatively influencing the market conversations and/or convincing anybody in their circle to change their consumption. Thus, consumers’ distinct voice styles (either positive or negative) reveal many neglected elements and hence they need to be discussed to understand the effects of value they create with their voice in today’s consumption world.

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Direct Consumer Voice In direct consumer voice, consumer put the company into position of direct receiver of the voice and message. Although it is more common to hear from consumers directly when there is something wrong, there are generally two options at the beginning either pleasant or unpleasant situation happens between consumer and company. Thus, you either raise your voice or prefer not to raise your voice to the company and other market actors. When you raise your voice to positive events, then you are called a fan or a loyal consumer. However, if you raise your voice to an unpleasant experience you went through, then they call you a problem person, complainer, upset consumer or in fact activist [38]. If you ask the money’s worth, then you are called all of a sudden “activist” which might have negative connotation. This is the irony of being vociferous consumer from marketing point of view. On the other hand, if you prefer to shut up and quietly feel sorry about yourself, then you are called a good guy. In the literature, these consumers called “passives” [46] as they do not feel positive about complaining because of their strong personal and cultural norms. Similarly, some others felt alienated if they do not get to be heard, and they leave the markets as they feel helpless and powerless when it came to redressing wrongs [1]. But the alienated consumers’ number is going down as more and more consumers are subscribed various online groups and communities, and hence, consumers feel empowered thanks to the Internet. I must say even though the voice of fans is also increasingly shaping market conversations which is naturally supported by the company; dissatisfied and disgruntled consumer voices are perhaps stronger impact in markets now because of the digital market’s democratic architecture. The part of the reason, we, consumers, mostly make our decisions based on our or others’ negative experiences or we weigh negative experiences more than positive ones, which is also called “negativity bias” [23, 24]. In today’s digital markets, there are too many positive voices that many started to believe that such positivity perhaps inflated by company efforts such as hiring voices (aka “paid bloggers”) or other consumers who spread positivity regarding company’s product/services for money. Thus, people approach positive consumer voice with skepticism unless they know the source. This is especially true when the company is involved

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in the negative event or a scandal. In some circumstance, you, as an audience, cannot be sure whether the person who put those inflated positive views is compensated by the company one way or another. In many dissatisfaction situations, the first option could be to voice the complaint directly to the company that is at the center of the problem. In traditional complain literature, this is called “voice response” as it covers complaining to the retailer, service provider, company [45, 46]. If the company gets less responsive to voice response, the consumer voice gets more irritant, and consumer might carry his/her voice to public. A recent study showed that unhappy consumers are not directly talking with the company and not sharing their experience with brands [21]. That is because they are very unhappy that they burned the bridges with the company and go public to reflect their unhappiness and perhaps hate [31]. Being less responsive to a direct positive voice can also generate some level of dissatisfaction and in fact turns love into avoidance and perhaps unhappiness. I remember I was awarded with a merit increase in my salary for my teaching, and I emailed back to the Dean of the school to thank for his consideration. But I have not received any simple email, saying “you are welcome” or just a short thoughtful note. That made me a little bit irritated. Similarly, I was reading a Rick Steve’s article about my home country in a local newspaper, and I got so excited and wanted to email him and share my excitement and my feelings. But, again, I did not receive any response to my email. At that point, you feel like these people do not care about you or your view. And that is a bitter feeling for some. Now, it makes sense why people get especially angry when they do not hear from the company that they had positive or negative experience with. Unresponsive stand against either positive or negative direct voice is a recipe to a disappointment. If a consumer is directly voicing you, it means that he/she believes that they are hundred percent with you, or they are hundred percent right and hence the problem can easily be solved with your help. And, if you failed to hear that, then you deserve their anger, revenge, and perhaps their hate [31]. They will probably get really ballistic in public complaining and in review sites, and in fact, they build their own website to recruit additional disgruntled consumers to forcefully attack your image [27]. In other words, not hearing your consumer’s direct voice, you are strengthening your hater’s and competitors’ hand by yourself. In a way, you are returning a very helpful gift, or a friendly hand given to you to improve your relationships with your consumers [2]. Thus, if you cannot see good intentions and perceive everything you hear

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from consumers as a bad thing, you can even lose your loyal consumers who are actually seeking for finding ways to help you. In a simple service failure, consumers who prefer to direct response or “voice response” attribute to blame the company (internal locus) rather than themselves (external locus) [41]. With the increasing feeling of entitlements and narcissistic tendencies in our consumption cultures [33], it is possible to witness more direct responses in the markets. This also might be an indicator of consumers’ brand or company hate as such consumers feel that the failure is not their fault and they are entitled to raise their voice [31]. From a demographic point of view, it is found that people who raise their voices and complaints are tend to be from high incomes and higher education groups [36]; thus, they have more recourses and they are, perhaps, highly confident and assertive to challenge the company. Others perceived too much risk of complaining such as embarrassment [46]. However, complaints can be anonymous in companies’ websites and many public places now; thus, embarrassment could not that a big deal in today’s digital world. Furthermore, the Internet technology makes it easier for consumers to voice their dissatisfaction directly to the companies [41] by simple marking a star rating or simply writing a couple of words in a space just provided for you. The research also showed that consumers who feel empowered and have control over the causes of such failures prefer to voice their dissatisfaction directly to the company [10]. Thus, with the rising consumer power in today’s digital world, more consumers voice their disagreement with companies [26, 32]. Nowadays, either you want to complain or not, you receive a rating option or a survey which makes it easier, straightforward, and effortless to raise your voice directly to the company at the end of your online shopping processes. At the end of many online shopping processes you either receive an email to your personal account about your experience with the company or immediately receive a couple of questions to measure if you had a good experience or have any concerns with the process. Thus, in these situations, there is direct intent to reach the company to raise voice or share some feedback. Either through direct company contact or through publicly available sources such as review sites, they provide direct consumer voice options. In fact, direct voice responses are default in today’s digital markets as companies need more trusting direct consumer voices as many suspects that third-party consumer voices could be fraudulent and manipulated by the competitors for profit.

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Online Consumer Reviews and Ratings Online consumer reviews and ratings provide important purchase information regarding the product/services, and hence, they impact company’s marketing efforts [7, 8, 47]. Online consumer reviews and ratings reflect consumers’ overall satisfaction with the product/services he/she is receiving. Since these reviews and rating scores can be stored in aggregate, they are also called “crowd opinion” or “normative evaluations” [13]. Many consumers are now checking such online consumer reviews and ratings before making a purchase decision, and thus, such consumer voice has the capacity to influence the company’s reputation in both positive and negative ways [43]. Companies know that negative consumer voice can hurt them through reducing other consumers likelihood of purchasing the product [40] and negatively influence company’s public image and reputation if it comes from other publicly available online consumer review and opinion sites [47]. These kinds of consumer voices are intended to directly target the company. Perhaps, consumers feel different kinds of self-satisfaction by being empowered by the technology allows them to raise their voice directly to the company. Consumers can raise their voice to company by writing reviews about the product/services they received or simply mark a number that refers the level of satisfaction in a star-system in a company’s or third-party provider’s website. Most of the online reviews naturally cover textual and descriptive information while ratings provide numerical information. Thus, I will name rating scores as “numeric consumer voice” as consumers scale their satisfaction/dissatisfaction with a single-digit number as opposed to “textual consumer voice” where consumers explain their feelings and experiences with sentences about the product/services within a textual format. In this context, reading numeric consumer voice requires less cognitive efforts to evaluate consumers’ experiences with only one number instead of reading a long text to figure out to understand by reading between the lines. Interestingly, consumers who use such rating systems are also under the influence of their cultures on how to read these ratings. A recent research found that in countries with higher “individualism” and “uncertainty avoidance” scores, consumers tend to be sensitive toward rating systems’ valance, while the volume of ratings (number of people who ranked the product/service) is more important in countries where high “power distance” and “uncertainty avoidance” are dominant [25]. Thus, consumer reviews and ratings are indispensable

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part of our digital economies all around the world. This, in turn, indicates that consumer voice either textual or numeric has an active role shaping millions of transactions all around the world. Although numeric consumer voice provides easy to evaluate options, such numeric consumer voice is also not free from some psychological biases [44]. For example, when consumers see positive evaluations may generate more positive reviews while negative reviews have a reverse impact [35]. Similarly, some consumers prefer to post positive reviews when they are satisfied while they were not posting or stop talking with company when they are dissatisfied [11, 21]. Interestingly, the research shows that majority of consumer reviews are overwhelmingly positive [8, 20]. Clearly, no companies are trying to get a negative consumer review or a one-star rating, and hence, they are also trying various tactics to take advantages of such decision biases and manipulate consumers reviews for their benefits; hence, they are artificially inflating consumer positive reviews. On the contrary, we, consumers, like to play with the rating system as well. For example, one time I had a Korean Uber driver, a sweat old man. Once I arrived my destination, he reminds me to give him five stars, when I was stepping outside his car. And I did give him a five-star rating as I do not want to hurt his feelings even though he could have done a couple of things better. In another word, I tweaked my rating a little bit. Thus, in some point, I inflated my ratings to give his five stars instead of four stars. Similarly, I remember watching thriller called Equalizer in which Denzel Washington plays an Uber driver. One part of the movie, Denzel Washington drops his passenger, a terribly abused young woman, and went to the guys who called him as Uber driver with the excuse of that he was not paid. Of course, the purpose was not to get paid but teach a lesson to those spoiled rich boys a lesson as he is playing the role of Equalizer who delivers the justice for whom cannot by themselves. He goes upstairs to a luxury condo and one by one beats those spoiled young boys for the things they did to that young and vulnerable woman. He leaves one person behind and tell him to call 911 and tell everything truthfully to the police. And he specifically reminds him who was very scared and shaking at the moment to not to forget to give him a five-star rating. He turns back at the door and reminds the guy, one more time, to give him five-star rating. He walks back to his car and the minute he returns to his car his phone blinks and he sees a five-star rating is placed in his reviews from his phone’s screen. Surely, in real life, you cannot

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simply beat your customers and expect them to give you five-star rating. You can only do it in the movies. But this interestingly exemplifies that we all started to shape our lives based on such rating systems. It seems we cannot make decision and feel incapacitated without them in consumption places. Close to home, student evaluation of instructor’s and professor’s teaching performance is a good example of how our biases shape our ratings. A study found that students knowingly report untrue claims and falsify their evaluations about their instructors/professors in 30% of the time [9]. In another research, it is found that instructor’s “physical attractiveness,” which has nothing to do with teaching performance, also plays role in evaluating instructor’s teaching performance [14]. Considering such instructors’ and professors’ livelihood highly depended on such student evaluations of them, many professors were evaluated wrongly and perhaps fired unfairly, yet we continue to rely on such rating systems when we evaluate the performance. Because we tend to give bad reviews to the people just because we did not like the person even though he/she did a perfect job, or give very inflated high ratings to the person who did not do a good job, either way, we make our decisions under our misperceptions rather than realistic evaluations. This, in turn, indicates we, consumers, tend to play with the system, either consciously or unconsciously, if we perceive it is our benefits and hence can easily mislead others with our fake and unrealistic reviews and ratings. Yet, such online reviews and rating system are still more trusted source than company-generated branding communications [13, 37]. Similarly, there seems too much positivity in the markets if you look at all sorts of consumer ratings and reviews. As if everybody is perfect and doing great job providing good products and services. But the truth is nobody is perfect or in fact terrible; thus, whoever says they are perfect or imperfect there is perhaps a logical flaw. I think this is a dangerous trend, as we artificially inflating our positive reviews, some are bribed by companies and some others created by our unconscious and emotional selections. By doing so, we undervalue and deny our real problems which eventually will hurt all the market actors and the market itself in the long run. This, eventually, is eradicating consumers’ trust toward consumer reviews. In fact, some managers are even claiming that they need negative reviews for the sake of credibility [34] as also expressed by a successful business owner “We need bad reviews…It’s an odd thing, but it adds credibility” (Lemin 2105, p. 50).

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Interestingly, research found that negative consumer reviews can also increase consumers’ purchase likelihood and hence sales through increasing the awareness of brands in consumer markets [3]. However, this could be only true for unknown brands or brands with low awareness in consumer markets. Thus, there is a fragile balance between brand awareness and consumer reviews, especially for negative reviews, in the digital markets, and this issue needs to be discussed carefully. Table 4.1. helps this purpose in this context as follows. Some brands have a high brand awareness in the market which means they can be recognized by the majority of consumers. These brands have been around for a while, perhaps even from your parents’ time, such as Coca Cola and Boeing, and hence have strongly established positions in consumer minds. If such brands have positive publicity, which also reveals itself in consumer reviews, then you are talking about increasing brand growth and positive and strong place in consumers’ minds (called “hiker” brand in Table 4.1). On the other hand, when such well-known brands in the markets can have very negative publicity and negative consumer reviews, then reputation of these brands goes nosedive and in fact declared unwanted (called “diver” brand in Table 4.1). This generally happens when big brands go through scandals such as Boeing’s 737 Max passenger plane crashes and kills hundreds, or Toyota’s suddenly accelerating vehicles danger many drivers live. With the increasing such negative publicity, these well-known brands experienced nosedive reputation as well as sales growth.

(-) Awareness

(+)

Table 4.1 Brand awareness and consumer reviews/ratings

(-)

Diver

Hiker

Sleeper

Starter

Consumer Reviews/Ratings

(+)

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The story is a little bit different for the brands that have low brand awareness though. These brands need to be first recognized to start their journey in consumers’ world. Thus, every kind of recognition is good for them. Good or bad, they just need to be recognized by the consumers and be able to get into consumers’ attention span. Even this can be good enough for marketers in these days. Thus, negative consumer reviews might especially be good for these unknown brands. In today’s digital markets, everybody competes for consumer attention, and that is the main reason why many scholars called this digital economy as “attention economy.” In this context, negativity is a very significant attention starter. Because the cost of not recognized by consumers is way too high than being recognized, even negative consumer reviews can help to get recognized in digital markets. Thus, unknown brands can be put into consumer mind through negativity as such negativity ameliorates over time, and in fact, consumer might even think positive about the brand he/she hurt negative things in the past. This is also called “sleeper effect” [19] psychology in literature in which people disassociate the message over time in the memory and they do not remember how they heard about such unknown brands. Thus, I call these brands “sleeper” brands as you never know when their negatively gained awareness can be transformed into positive as also indicated in Table 4.1. Similarly, in my longitudinal research, I also found that consumer complaint websites which carry extreme negative reviews focus on product/brand failures were disappeared after four years while majority of consumer complaint and anti-branding sites focused on corporate social irresponsibility are still around and are active [28]. Thus, complaint-based negative publicity might be forgotten easily and hence has more potential to generate sleeper effects. This could also be common for especially frequently purchased items and some shopping goods as there is fewer financial risks attached to these kinds of items. But if the severity of negativity perhaps influences consumers’ ability to remember the item in a truthful way, in other words, slightly negative reviews perhaps fall into prey of sleeper effects. But, in that case, the shock value created by stronger negativity publicity cannot build a stronger brand awareness in the consumer’s mind. In another research, I have discovered that some consumers actually were intrigued by such negativity and they wanted to learn more about why consumers use such derogatory and aggressive language [29]. While our minds are getting busy to figuring out why these people are so negative, we slowly develop strong awareness of the

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unknown brand. This can be true even such negativity is irrelevant to the consumers’ interest [3]. As a result, amelioration of such unknown brands can have unexpected impacts on brands. We also not to forget that if consumers believe that company’s negative reviews based on some factors that cannot be controllable by the company, then the company reputation is not negatively influenced by such negative consumer reviews [43]. Finally, if the brand is receiving good reviews yet not well known in the markets, you probably are not doing good job informing the markets. Although company might be suffering from lack of brand awareness, the company can reach consumers’ minds with right promotion and communication techniques. You want to create positive awareness and hence hope that such first positive impression continues years to come. Many business owners shoot for such a good start. This is a good sign that you are doing something good that you are receiving positive publicity and you will probably be adapted by consumers once you were able to penetrate to the markets with admiration you received from markets as long as you keep doing what you are doing right. This is what I called “starter” brands (as indicated in Table 4.1). Starters enjoy early growth created by their positive impression, but their success will also be depended on their ability to transform their first impression of long-lasting positive brand attitude and hence brand loyalty. These direct consumer voice responses can be beneficial for companies as they directly come from consumers. Companies can be benefited from these responses as long as they want to hear consumers and not turn blind. But indirect consumer voice, which is received from other than consumers even though it is generated by consumers, can be difficult to control as you do not know when such voice hits you.

Indirect Consumer Voice An old Turkish saying says “a mother-in-law says to her my daughter, I am telling you this but my bride (daughter-in-law), you listen carefully.” In a way, the mother-in-law tries to communicate indirectly to her new daughter-in-law just welcomed to the family to not to crash course her about the family norms and rules. Thus, she uses her own daughter as an example to teach the new daughter-in-law the family rules, or perhaps her own rules. She communicates with her daughter-in-law indirectly and this can be very effective way of communicating with new family member. The communication is generally very limited when you don’t know each

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other especially if the person you must communicate frequently to survive together such as a family; thus, you need to find more constructive way of voicing your concerns indirectly to others you don’t know very well so that nobody’s feelings hurt. This prevents many head-on personality clashes early-on in the family, and hence, a healthy and long-lasting family relationship can be established. In other words, even though you think that you are not the major subject of the communication process or the receiver of the communication, you could well be in that position. This is similar to what I meant with indirect consumer voice in this section. Some consumers share their positive experiences in the same way with their family and friends and create a demand for the company/brand without even knowing it. In contrary, some share their displeasures with others and hurt companies’ image. These consumers just do not want to go straight to the company, but they share their dissatisfaction or unpleasant experiences with close ones. These consumers are not your fan base or loyal consumers. They might think it is not worth to go titfor-tat with the company, and perhaps they think that they can still survive with the negative experience they had with the company, but they don’t want to brag about it and hence share their concerns with their close friends and family. They are kind of self-checking their plans to make sure they are right, and they are not doing something stupid. Or, perhaps, they think or assume that the company is not going to listen their small problems. But they want to get their money’s worth. There is some sweat revenge feeling and consumer needs some friend therapy to go over the problem he/she is going through with the company. Lastly, consumer might have gone to the company for help and they did not get any resolution and in fact treated inappropriately. At that point, consumer needs some resolution with the company in his/her world by sharing his/her painful experience with others. This is more like a power struggle with the company. Perhaps, the consumer might want to punish the company by exposing their unethical or immoral behaviors to others who have not had a relationship with the company. Thus, there are some anger and revenge feelings function together in this case which stimulate consumers to go on an extra mile to hurt the company. This kind of indirect voicing is called “private responses” in complaint literature and naturally classified as “easy” action [12] as it is always less confrontational and easy to talk with a friend and a family member rather than directly talking with the company’s customer services where

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consumer needs to explain his/her situation over and over again for hours and jump through lots of hoops to get what he/she needs. A final alternative indirect consumer voice is called “third-party” responses in the consumer complaint literature [12, 46]. What is meant by “third party” is bringing your voice to a formal agency such as a governmental institution that has a legal and enforcement power to change the company’s behavior. We are also witnessing another type of third party, which earned public’s outmost trust with its policies and actions, acts like a moral compass. These kinds of institutions, such as BBB (Better Business Bureau), punish the company by their certification system by siding with company policy and practices that enhance consumer welfare. These institutions receive consumer complaints and analyze company operations and change their certification to inform the public about ethicality of the company operations. Third-party responses or voices are generally defined as hard actions [12] as not everybody want to take a legal action against the company. This hard action can actually get harder for especially minorities that are struggling social alienation and trust. A recent research found that minorities (such as Hispanic and African American communities) complain to government agencies substantially less relative to their rate of victimization [39], and this perhaps also indicates that such minorities might not believe that their complaints can change anything in the long run. Such communities can also be seen as vulnerable populations, and when they do not complaint to government, this means many negative experiences go undetected, which eventually lead consumer silence. Perhaps, some change their complaint channels to other publicly available platforms to hurt the company. In general, consumers do not want third-party responses very often unless they feel there is really no way to fix the problem but elevating the voice to third-party complaint. This is also a strong indicator that consumer might feel very deep revenge and betrayal that he/she can no way let the bad experience go away, and the problem is existential in some ways. Thus, the company must pay the price for wrongfully handling the situation and this should exemplify to all the others watching in the market so that this never happens again. These kinds of consumers not only focus on personal compensations but also social justice. Although some consumers engage in a single voice or private response, some others might use more than two voicing options such as voice and private response together, private, and third-party response, etc. However, if a consumer engages in all of the complaint responses together such

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as utilizing voice, private and third-party complaints, then we define these consumers “activist” [46]. If consumer using both direct and indirect consumer voices or going from his/her personal domain to public domain, that indicates that problem is more serious and complex than it appears and this could be the sign of simmering hate toward the company [31]. One thing is certain that if consumer decided to go with indirect voice options, the company loses its control over the problem. I must say direct consumer voice should be more valuable for the company and market welfare as constructive communication options is still alive and is an option. However, indirect negative consumer voice presents more dangerous outcomes for the company, but it is necessary for the market democracy. Last decade, there has not been too much changes in third-party responses other than a few additions of watchdogs. However, there have been stormy changes in WOM since the advent of digital technology and social networking sites. WOM has been turned to be a major consumer voice option with the digital revolution. Nowadays, many consumers engage in other’s discussions and share others voice with their social networks. WOM is generated authentically in consumer communities and generally not created with the intend of directly communicating with the company. In fact, WOM works more like group therapy tool for the creators and receivers of WOM. Thus, it should not be classified as direct but indirect communication and consumer voice option. With the advent of social networking systems, WOM gains more power in information crowds, started working as alternative of marketer-generated communication options. There was no time in business history when consumer voice is more organized and empowered than today’s social networking era. Thus, WOM or I should call “electronic WOM” (e-WOM) needs to be discussed more broadly in consumer voice context. e-WOM WOM is perhaps the oldest way of exchanging ideas among fellow consumers in the markets. It is defined as an informal, noncommercial, unorganized, and sometimes unplanned conversations about products and services among consumers [16], either consumer personally experienced the product and services or not. Thus, it is not intended to be created to develop a direct communication with the company but more like conversation among consumers. Thus, traditionally the information

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transmission in a WOM generally happens between known and trusted individuals and consumers such as close friends and family members [5]. However, this is not the case in the digital world as WOM can be freely shared among unknown strangers. Thus, WOM might also be perceived as fraudulent as the source of information was not easily defined in today’s digital platforms. In digital world, consumers need to spend more cognitive effort and do some detective work to analyze such eWOM they are receiving not to fall into prey of fraudulent intend. As a result, consumers started to spend more time analyzing such e-WOM about the products/services they are planning to buy, but some less motivated consumers just simply make suboptimal decision and go with what e-WOM recommends to them [18]. In other words, the quality of information, which is measured with information relevancy, source credibility and information quantity, introduced in e-WOM now determines the power of WOM [13]. Inherently, there was no direct company control over the information exchanged among consumers through WOM as companies were not that successful to detect consumer-generated WOM in the past. Most of the time, such conversations dissolved in the markets without even reaching to the markets. Thus, majority of WOM, in traditional sense, were not detected by company’s market information systems. Part of the reason, because such WOM communications were passive and stuck between a few groups of consumers and could not reach to big audiences and whole markets. Even if it did, companies had an upper hand to position themselves before the WOM storms hit them by using their broadcasting power to change the story or eliminate the negative effects of WOM. As a result, many consumers who are the spreaders of such WOM campaigns were marginalized and felt alienated in the markets. However, the feeling of alienation is far less likely on the Internet because of the connectivity utilized by online communities in today’s digital world. Furthermore, since these conversations are not commercially oriented or not directed from the company, e-WOM may have much greater credibility and relevance and hence may generate more empathy compared to marketer-generated information and content online [4]. In this context, the significant amount of research showed that WOM can work better than company-generated voice such as advertisement and personal sales [22]. Part of the reason e-WOM now can also reach the consumers beyond the boundaries of traditional WOM in a speed of hours, and hence become very powerful tool in terms of impacting many

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traditional marketing functions such as creating brand awareness, attitude change, and/or innovation adoption [22]. Thus, the power of consumer voice in the form of e-WOM in today’s digital world seems indisputably the most influential marketing tool even though fraudulent practices are also in rise. In an ordinary purchase process, consumers rely on other consumers’ suggestions and WOM before purchasing a product/service to reduce the potential purchase risks. Likewise, they spread WOM after purchase to inform the others about their satisfaction/dissatisfaction to reward or punish the company and the brand. Thus, usage of WOM can vary depending on where the consumer in purchase decision process. In another word, consumers are also consumers of WOM in the prepurchase stages while they are producers of WOM in the post-purchase stages. Some research defines consumers as “active” when they share their experiences with others while defining consumers as “passive” when they search for other consumers’ view about the product/service they are planning to buy [48]. Irony is consumers of WOM can quickly turn into producers of WOM quickly in the digital world. There is no such a simultaneous transformational role existing in any business functions other than e-WOM, as consumers can easily turn into producers. Interestingly, this happens so automatically that consumers sometimes do not even realize their role in production and dissemination of e-WOM momentarily. It is metamorphosis of ordinary consumers into advocates. In general, WOM communications have two major marketing functions. One is to create “awareness” and the other one is to create “persuasiveness.” Interestingly, awareness is generally created by non-loyal consumers [15] or consumers with weak ties to the company since loyal consumers probably get the information about the products/services way before anybody else in the markets. Loyal consumers are heavy users and advocates of the company’s products/services. Thus, these consumers have strong ties with the company rather than less loyal consumers and hence they have up to date information regarding the products/services. Weak ties in networked environments indicate the connections between a person and strangers while strong ties indicate the connections between a person and acquaintances or close friends and family members. A research showed that weak ties, which come from strangers, can work as a bridge that connects different networks or groups. The “bridges” indicates the weak ties as discussed by Granovetter [17] that “no strong tie is bridge”; hence, they connect major networks to each other. Without weak ties, no

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networks/groups/consumers communities would have been connected [17]. As a result, such weak ties take the major role in diffusion of the information in the form of WOM in the markets. They are the major awareness-building connectors among networks even though they might not present trustworthy and convincing links. Such links in marketing world are disloyal or less loyal consumers. And research revealed that less loyal consumers might have a bigger impact on creating awareness [15]. On the other hand, strong ties are generally referred to close-knitted ties within the network/group/community, and hence, the trust between members is higher and paramount. One could express that the weak ties are good for building awareness among networks while strong ties are good for persuading members of networks and community. Thus, it is important to understand such differences in order to understand how indirect consumer voices function in consumption world. Furthermore, WOM is inherently a consumer communication tool. As explained above, it is naturally generated within consumer communities not in company’s marketing departments. In marketing theory, this kind of WOM is defined as “endogenous WOM” as the WOM conversations are originally initiated and created by the consumers not the company [15]. Because it is consumer-generated nature, endogenous WOM is perceived trustworthy and reliable source of information. The power of endogenous consumer WOM was also realized by the companies. Hence, they started to initiate and orchestrate their own WOM campaigns in the digital platforms to gain more control over endogenous consumer WOM and encounter some consumer-generated claims. This is also conceptualized as “exogenous WOM” as it is generated exogenously by the company not naturally by consumers. In other words, endogenous WOM is initiated and implemented by consumers while exogenous WOM is initiated and implemented by companies [15]. Through initiating exogenous WOM, companies also want to eliminate negative WOM that can hurt their brand image and sales. Especially, the most valuable and larger brands suffer more negativity voice (e.g., negative tweets) created by consumers (also conceptualized as “Negative Double Jeopardy” (NDJ) phenomenon) [42]. Furthermore, the research also showed that there might be a negativity bias in WOM-based information as it seems consumers are more influenced by negative WOM than positive WOM [22]. According to a research, negative WOM can influence infrequent buyers’ decisions at the existence of positive WOM [6].

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Such infrequent buyers open the door to market penetration and market enlargement if they cannot handle well. Negative consumer WOM can be difficult to control, and some of them are legitimate while some others are not. In today’s digital consumption places, it is difficult to predict when and where such negative WOM hit the company. In some point, a negative WOM acts like a torpedo lost its course in an open sea and can hit you unexpectedly at any time since e-WOM can now travel far corners of the digital world in a short notice. For that reason, some companies develop their own early detection systems that listen markets and consumers’ conversations about the products and brand they produce. A simple negative conversation can trigger company intervention with apology and rewards to the consumers before that negativity reaches uncontrollable level. This is also used to eliminate the consumer brand hate in early stages [31]. But it could be difficult to listen markets and consumer conversations in social networking sites all the time. Thus, some companies see positive WOM as remedy against negative WOM. In short, the unpredictability of negative WOM made companies highly dependent on positive consumer WOM [16] to counter such negative WOM. For that reason, some of these companies developed ways to go around such endogenous WOM by hiring other consumers to start their own endogenous e-WOM campaigns to claim control over consumer voice. Consumers who work for some of these companies, consciously or unconsciously, receive bribe like gifts and, in some cases, they receive money for their service, which is generating positive WOM for company either its true or not. This is different than exogenous WOM as these companies embed paid consumers to change the truth on their benefits and hence corrupt the consumer voice. This eventually devalues the real consumer voice naturally created endogenous consumers WOM. In order to protect consumers’ right to access true information about product/series, government agencies such as “Federal Trade Commission” (FTC) regulate such corrupted e-WOM initiatives and mandate that consumers must declare if they were paid or given any gift from the company for their effort to generate WOM. This, in fact, includes not only consumers but also celebrities and online influencers who are hired to promote the companies’ products/services [49]. Furthermore, although some companies stopped using paid consumer views, some others started to use bots to generate automated WOM to encounter endogenous negative WOM. This, eventually, leads to dissemination of misleading market information for the benefit of the company

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as such polluted market voice with misleading and untrue information reached unprecedented levels. In some point, the trustworthiness of endogenous WOM was so much so broken that it is not clear which information to believe unless companies start publicly declaring their paid consumers and they were closely watched by government and third-party watchdogs. These, in turn, lead to what I call “polluted market voice.” Such contaminated voice eventually devalues the consumer-generated authentic e-WOM and hence destroys the essence of our social and economic market value systems. In worst case, the society and consumers lose their consciousness as it was not clear what to believe in markets. Unfortunately, the trust to consumer-generated endogenous e-WOM is now replaced with skepticism and uncertainty in the digital markets. Obviously, the war is still going on who is going to control consumer voice or the true market consciousness that can reflect true market voice. This war over market voice has dire consequences for all of the market actors. Consumers cannot effort such corrupted and polluted market voice to destroy our true and fair market value systems, while companies cannot effort consumers are tarnishing their brand images [30] with bad faith with negative e-WOM in every opportunity. Clearly, this is also a fair-trade problem as unfairly directed consumption with direct or indirect consumer voice will hurt both consumers and companies in the long run. Therefore, there is a need to evaluate such interactions in a more constructive manner to find a better functioning market voice for the benefit of all market actors so that our digital economies and economic value systems can be evaluated fairly in today’s digital markets.

References 1. Allison, Neil K. 1978. A Psychometric Development of a Test for Consumer Alienation from the Marketplace. Journal of Marketing Research 15 (4): 565–575. 2. Barlow, Janelle, and Claus Moller. 2008. A Complaint Is a Gift: Recovering Consumer Loyalty When Things Go Wrong. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Kohler Publishing Inc. 3. Berger, Jonah, Alan T. Sorensen, and Scott J. Rasmussen. 2010. Positive Effects of Negative Publicity: When Negative Reviews Increase Sales. Marketing Science 29 (5): 815–827. 4. Bickart, Barbara, and Robert M. Schindler. 2001. Internet Forums as Influential Sources of Consumer Information. Journal of Interactive Marketing 15 (3): 31–40.

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19. Hannah, Darlene B., and Brian Sternthal. 1984. Detecting and Explaining the Sleeper Effect. Journal of Consumer Research 11 (2): 632–642. 20. Hu, Nan, Jie Zhang, and Paul A. Pavlou. 2009. Overcoming the J-Shaped Distribution of Product Reviews. Communications of the ACM 52 (10): 144–147. 21. Hydock, Chris, Zoey Chen, and Kurt Carlson. 2020. Why Unhappy Customers Are Unlikely to Share Their Opinions with Brands. Journal of Marketing. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022242920920295. 22. Ismagilova, Elvira, Yogesh K. Dwivedi, Emma Slade, and Michael D. Williams. 2017. Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) in the Marketing Context: A State of the Art Analysis and Future Directions. Cham: Springer Briefs in Business. 23. Kanouse, David E., and L. Reid Hanson. 1972. Negativity in Evaluations. In E. Jones, E. Kanouse, S. Valins, H. Kelley, E. Nisbett, and B. Weiner (Eds.), Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of Behavior. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press. 24. Kanouse, David. E. 1984. Explaining Negativity Biases in Evaluation and Choice Behavior: Theory and research. ACR North American Advances 11: 703–708. 25. Kübler, Raoul, Koen Pauwels, Gökhan Yildirim, and Thomas Fandrich. 2018. App Popularity: Where in the World Are Consumers Most Sensitive to Price and User Ratings? Journal of Marketing 82 (5): 20–44. 26. Kucuk, S. Umit, and Sandeep Krishnamurthy. 2007. An Analysis of Consumer Power on the Internet. Technovation 27 (1–2): 47–56. 27. Kucuk, S. Umit. 2008. Negative Double Jeopardy: The Role of Anti-Brand Sites on the Internet. Journal of Brand Management 15 (3): 209–222. 28. Kucuk, S. Umit. 2010. Negative Double Jeopardy Revisited: A Longitudinal Analysis. Journal of Brand Management 18 (2): 150–158. 29. Kucuk, S. Umit. 2015. A Semiotic Analysis of Consumer-Generated AntiBranding. Marketing Theory 15 (2): 243–264. 30. Kucuk, S. Umit. 2016. Exploring the Legality of Consumer Anti-Branding Activities in the Digital Age. Journal of Business Ethics 139 (1): 77–93. 31. Kucuk, S. Umit. 2019. Brand Hate: Navigating Consumer Negativity in the Digital World, 2nd ed. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 32. Labrecque, Lauren I., Jonas vor dem Esche, Charla Mathwick, Thomas P. Novak, and Charles F. Hofacker. 2013. Consumer Power: Evolution in the Digital Age. Journal of Interactive Marketing 27 (4): 257–269. 33. Lash, Christopher. 1979. Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton. 34. Lemin, Daniel. 2015. Manipurated: How Business Owners Can Fight Fraudulent Online Ratings and Reviews. Fresno, CA: Linden Publishing.

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35. Moe, Wendy W., and David A. Schweidel. 2010. Online Product Opinions: Incidence, Evaluation, and Evolution. Marketing Science 31 (3): 372–386. 36. Moyer, Mel S. 1984. Characteristics of Consumer Complainants: Implications for Marketing and Public Policy. Journal of Public Policy and Marketing 3 (1): 67–84. 37. Nielsen. 2013. The Reviews Are In: Yelp users Are Four-Start Consumers. Visited on May 18, 2020. https://www.nielsen.com/tw/en/insights/art icle/2013/the-reviews-are-in-yelp-users-are-four-star-consumers/. 38. Pfaff, Martin, and Sheldon Blivice. 1977. Socioeconomic Correlates of Consumer and Citizen Dissatisfaction and Activism. In Consumer Satisfaction, Dissatisfaction and Complaining Behavior, ed. R. Day, 115–123. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 39. Raval, Devesh. 2020. Whose Voice Do We Hear in the Marketplace? Evidence from Consumer Complaint Behavior. Marketing Science 39 (1): 168–187. 40. Reinstein, David A., and Christopher M. Snyder. 2005. The Influence of Expert Reviews on Consumer Demand for Experience Goods: A Case Study of Movie Critics. Journal of Industrial Economics 53 (1): 27–51. 41. Robertson, Nichola, and Robin N. Shaw. 2005. Conceptualizing the Influence of the Self-Service Technology Context on Consumer Voice. Services Marketing Quarterly 27 (2): 33–50. 42. Rogers, Andrew, Kate L. Daunt, Peter Morgan, and Malcolm Beynon. 2017. Examining the Existence of Double Jeopardy and Negative Double Jeopardy Within Twitter. European Journal of Marketing 51 (7/8): 1224–1247. 43. Rose, Mei, and Jeffrey G. Blodgett. 2016. Should Hotels Respond to Negative Online Reviews? Cornell Hospitality Quarterly 57 (4): 396–410. 44. Schneider, Christoph, Markus Weinmann, Peter Mohr, and Jan vom Brocke. 2020. When the Stars Shine Too Bright: The Influence of Multidimensional Ratings on Online Consumer Ratings. Management Science, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3572654. 45. Singh, Jagdip. 1988. Consumer Complaint Intentions and Behavior: Definitional and Taxonomical Issues. Journal of Marketing 52 (1): 93–107. 46. Singh, Jagdip. 1990. A Typology of Consumer Dissatisfaction Response Styles. Journal of Retailing 66 (1): 57–97. 47. Ullrich, Sebastian, and Christian Boris Brunner. 2015. Negative Online Consumer Reviews: Effects of Different Responses. Journal of Product & Brand Management 24 (1): 66–77. 48. Wang, Youcheng, and Daniel R. Fesenmaier. 2004. Towards Understanding Members’ General Participation in and Active Contribution to an Online Travel Community. Tourism Management 25 (6): 709–722. 49. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/plain-language/1001a-inf luencer-guide-508_1.pdf.

CHAPTER 5

Voiceconomics

Abstract This chapter discusses the fundamental changes in today’s economic rules with the rise of voicesumers in the digital world. The chapter explains how influencers and followers create economic value with their voice in the social media. The value created by number of followers and the quality of voice of influencers are all discussed in light of the currently developing digital consumer behavior literature. The economic value of tone of voice such as human-like and business-like voices and their impact on consumer voice engagements are also discussed with a new theoretical framework. Thus, the study provided insights on how consumer voice is reshaping market valuation processes through transforming production and consumption of consumer voice. Keywords Voiceconomics · Influencers · Influencer marketing · Followers · Tone of voice · Consumer engagement

The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions. —Adlai Stevenson

A little gray Massachusetts cat called “Sockington” decides to go Twitter to raise his voice and talk with others. Over the time, he generated an impressive 1.3 million followers and reached a Twitter fame. Of course, the owner, Jason Scott, does the whole work behind the scene, but © The Author(s) 2020 S. U. Kucuk, Consumer Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53983-2_5

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this example shows that even a real cat impersonation with a creative messaging can reach the darkest corners of the Internet and activate interesting conversations among consumers, which in turn create significant amount of revenue. That, in fact, reminded me Peter Steiner’s famous the New Yorker cartoon published in the early 90s, in which two dogs sit in front of computer and say, “nobody knows you are a dog on the internet.” When I saw Sockington’s story, my mind automatically went to a nostalgic and funny state as if Steiner’s humor came true for a moment. Think about a second, a cat turns to be a social network sensation and millions of people are following him. Actually, they are following his owners imaginative and creative personification of him and his view of the world. Sockington is a good example of the power of voice, well in this case I should say “power of a paw’s voice” as also argued by the owner Jason Scott in an interview as follows: “People have come asking Socks to endorse products or speak about causes…or what does a cat have to do with the war in Darfur?” [30, 31] Mr. Scott couldn’t hide his surprise in one interview that Sockington’s voice could have an economic value as follows: “Everybody wants this social media bubble. They want something where we’re all chattering so much that we all get rich. This cat makes everybody look like fools because he’s got hundreds of thousands of followers. And he doesn’t tend to follow anyone but other animals.” [32] It is funny to see that this little cat reaches millions of followers that can make many marketing and communication professionals jealous. This is a simple example shows how a paw can monetize its voice by reaching millions of followers. One could even claim that Sockington’s voice is perhaps more valuable than alternative marketer-generated messages. How did Sockington reach this success? Because Sockington provided a rare and unimaginable perspective with a simple voice, which helped his followers to enjoy their life a little bit better. This little cat himself is the living proof that we, as human beings, can sometimes be silly and illogical. Sockington breaks down everything into basics that eventually make you realize many simple things that you probably would not realize otherwise. In some points, he brings you back to normal. The normal that we as human beings all forgot as we were busy with being consumption crazy machines. Thus, Sockington reminds us the comfort of being a normal human being, which eventually reduces your pain and paranoia, and make you peace with yourself. Of course, you are not the only one feels that way. Others realize Sockington’s magic and

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start following his remarks and stories. Thus, the demand to Sockington’s voice reaches very high levels which in turn brings money and fame to Sockington. He is the richest cat in the town these days, and that is where “voice economics” or what I call “voiceconomics” starts. The first rule to reach a market value is to have a market that demands the value. In other words, it needs a market in which buyer and seller can interact for best value that they both can benefit it from. Buyer should have willingness and ability to buy what is produced and seller should have capacity to create a value which is needed and has an exchange value. Without a market, which contains buyers and sellers, there will be no demand and supply, and hence no economic value. Furthermore, the efficient use of our limited resources can also directly influence the market valuation. In other words, if there is a value to what you have produced and if your creation is used efficiently and created a market awareness, then you are talking about “economizing” what was produced. If there is no need or value on an object, service or whatever is produced, then there is no economizing, and in fact, there is no mentioning of an economy. Now, you can think that words are plenty out there, like air, and hence there should not be any economic value of voice since it is not a scarce. But among these plenty of voice we can find the right voice that can create an economic value for us. In fact, some of us get tired of all sorts of voices surrounding us that we prefer to shoot down their senses and search for silence. In other words, they search for “noise-free voice” as discussed in Chapter 1. In other words, the mass information we exposed daily has eventually brought mass confusion to today’s markets as people’s attention span is lowered. Our brains cannot process this staggering amount of market information and sometimes we feel lost in this information overflow. Thus, many of us cannot stay concentrated on the messages for a long time. In other words, consumer “attention” is a scarce commodity in today’s digital markets. And that has an economic power. Sockington, in this context, was able to break such information clutter with his voice and channeled enough attention to her stories with a very direct, simple, and entertaining cat language. He was able to present simple stories with fruitful and truthful voice to the people, which in return created vale for his followers. Furthermore, in traditional shopping environments, consumers always ask opinions of someone important to them, a friend, or a family member, before buying products/services. Because we need some help getting reliable information that can help us to reduce shopping stress created

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by uncertainties surrounding around us. Many of us are burned off by the misleading and one-sided marketer-generated messages in the past that our paranoia about company-generated marketing voice is at the peak in today’s digital markets. There is no day we, as consumers, go without hearing a news that features a story about a fraudulent company practice. As consumers, many of us search for verification for marketergenerated information. Thus, we are thirsty for trustworthy, verifiable, and true voice rather than marketer- or company-generated marketing voice as the trust between consumers and companies is badly broken in today’s marketing world. And this trend continues with changing forms in this digital world. As Lewis and Weigert [19, p. 462] indicated “trust begins where knowledge ends.” Thus, consumers need honest, verifiable, and trustworthy voices, suggestions, and recommendations to follow, and such voice will be demanded. After all, trust is the currency of today’s digital markets [26]. Sockington, in this context, has a very simple life and simple perspectives to issues, thus the expectations to be fooled by a cat are very slim. He does not seem a person try to pull tricks on you to sell you something all the time on the Internet. From economic point of view, as long as Sockington continues to supply truthful and fruitful information for his followers, he will be demanded and continue to create economic value for his followers. Overall, we, as consumers, need something special, something worth to listen and engage into in today’s information pollution age. There are limited numbers of voice sources are worth our attention in this new economic order. In other words, the attention which is created with a friendly and reliable voice is the new asset which in turn economic value to voice owner with increasing number of followers. Thus, the analysis of followers who listen and follow the voice is necessary to understand the economic value of the voice created.

The Value of Voice When an initiator of a voice generates an engaging and truthful story or idea, the people who like what they hear may follow him/her next time and perhaps want to hear more from him/her again. When the “likes” show some consistency and people feel an urge to hear from you over and over again, their hand eventually goes to “follow” button. This means your followers are opening the door for you and welcome you into their world. In other words, you are given a celebrity or a friend status even

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though they do not know you personally not much. It means you relate to these people in a mental level and they want to follow you to hear from you since they value your thoughts, ideas, and feelings. Thus, there is an economic value created by your voice. Because you, as an initiator of the voice, have a power to influence or change your followers’ attitudes and sometimes behaviors. And advertisers would be willing to reach your audience for money. That indicates market value of your voice. You also as an initiator could turn to be a major WOM machine from your digital platform that chances all the value evaluations in the market. In the past, marketers used to measure consumer value with how much money they spend with the company, but nowadays consumer value is also measured by power of the voice and consumers’ ability to reach and influence other consumers. In another word, the value your followers gave it to your voice could be so much so higher than costly marketer-generated advertising and marketer campaigns which started to lose their power to control and influence their followers’ attitudes and behaviors. In that context, your voice could have more dollar value than marketer-generated voice. This itself indicates a major shift in traditional consumer valuation mentality in today’s economies. Thus, the “number of followers” is used as an indicator of the value of your voice by other consumers as well as advertisers. If the number of followers of consumer voice is more than the company can reach with marketer-generated communication tools such as advertisement, then consumer voice introduces extraordinary communication value. Simply, consumer voice got more efficient and perhaps effective compare to what is accomplished with company’s sources. In other words, the more the number of followers that your voice attracts, the bigger the market exposure you can achieve. In this context, the number of followers you were able to attract and influence will eventually determine the price of your voice and points out the demand side of the voiceconomics equation.

Quantity of Followers You can reach people with your voice, but the most important part how you can enter their lives. They can click on a “like” button, but “like” means that you got their attention. If you continue to generate similar content that speaks to them, then they want to follow you. Thus, “follow” means I am yours and you are part of my life and I want to hear from you more and regularly. The best scenario is if a receiver both likes you and

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follows you constantly. The more people follow you, the more demanded you are, and hence the more economic value attached to your voice. Thus, companies also want to benefit from your audience. Company advertisement money is directed to those voices who have significant number of followers. Clearly, such voicesumers are doing better job than their corporate counterparts in terms of reaching right people at the right time. This is so much so important for voicesumers that even some of the followers try to turn their back to them and unfollow them, such option was not granted to those followers. For example, it was for a while impossible to unfollow Ashton Kutcher, who is the first human who got one million followers in Twitter beat CNN in 2009, sparked some outrage especially when it is possible to unfollow CNN [33]. Although some believe that Twitter cheated in this experiment a little, it was a promising event reveals that an individual’s voice can also catch and go beyond a giant media emperor’s voice in terms of numbers. Of course, we want to assume that such voice has no intention to tweak the truth and mislead his/her followers just the sake of attract more followers. This eventually opens the question of “how much of the followings are real?” as we, human being, like to corrupt the systems we build for our own selfish needs. I see some of people I know and in fact I do not know follow me in Facebook, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, and so on, but not totally sure how they get to know me. I wonder why they are following me even though I do not know them. I follow back some of them even though I don’t know them, and I am not hundred person sure about the person, but I prefer to think that they were nice enough to follow me, so I follow them back. Thus, all of a sudden, I start following people even though I don’t know or some cases even I didn’t want to connect them in normal circumstances outside the digital world just listening my intuition. Cultural anthropologists call this “reciprocity bias”: We, human beings, naturally want to pay back to the ones who were nice to us and provided some sort of favor and concession. As a result, many people I do not know, or I am not fully sure about it are following me and I follow them back just to return their gestures. What if I figure out along the way that the person I started to follow and me have totally different views in many issues? Should I drop him from my followers or stay quiet and enjoy one extra follower in my stats? It seems reciprocity bias we fall into creates a fake feeling of community. However, from economic point of view, it is good that advertisers want to get a piece from the attention you have gathered with your voice

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over the years for money. It seems when the money gets into equation, people swallow up their pride and start using various tricks to increase the numbers of followers since the number followers is one of the major metrics advertisers use to understand the amount of demand to your voice generate. In fact, if you do not have enough followers, it means that people would think that your company or your voice is not appreciated in the market and perhaps your company or you are also not even good at what you are doing. The fact that people might be following you just because you have more followers than others not because of the power of your ideas, stories and content [7]. That point, you realize that reciprocity bias is actually a good thing. Sure, I follow you so that I can get more business and advertisement money. In fact, I need more of these so that I can get more competitive in the market. This, in turn, leads manipulative business practices of artificially boosting your follower numbers. For example, a company called Devumi [34] can help you to reach your follower targets by creating unreal or impersonated followers for you for money. What Devumi does create a “followers farm” that consisted of many illegitimate and fake followers for money so that your numbers can get attention of advertisers, other businesses, and your potential followers. The rule of tomb of follower business reveals that the more followers you have, the more organic followers (not fake ones) you can generate as a result [35]. Industry experts report that many well-known personalities have 20–50% fake accounts [35, 36]. When you look at these fake followers, you see that they do not engage in any conversations you have developed over the course of the time or no reactions to your voice, yet you might have more followers than anybody else in the market. Simply, you have no legitimate impact and no influence on market conversations, but you are making money out of nothing by fooling others. Thus, rightfully, a New York Times article these fake accounts as “counterfeit coins in the booming economy of online influence” [6]. The point of having many followers is that you can reach more people and create more market influence and impression. However, the number of followers is the only one side of the story. In marketing theory, market impression (Impression) is calculated by how many consumers or receivers you can reach (Reach) at how often (Frequency) in a specific time period. In a simple mathematical formulation, it is calculated as follows: “Impression = Reach × Frequency.” The idea is here to create as much as

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impression and hence exposure of the ideas to receiver so that you eventually see some attitudinal shift and changes in the behaviors you want to see. In this context, number of followers can generally be used as a “Reach” indicator. Another part of this equation is how often such followers hear your voice or exposed to your voice. The combination of both number of followers and how many times they exposed to your voice indicates the total impression value of your voice. Imagine you have thousands, hundred thousand or millions of followers, you will probably receive a call from Facebook or Twitter advertisement department. Why? Because your voice is doing a good job reaching consumers better than some companies marketer-generated messages. Every time you posted your views, you are creating new exposures to your followers, which has dollar value in terms of marketing communications. Hearing your voice is only translated into believing and hence some sort of behavioral change when it is repeated over and over time. When your followers “like” your then such “likes” are all shared with the other like-minded followers of yours. Thus, repetition of your voice increases. This, in turn, pulls the exposure of your voice in a new higher level. Even things you said are not true, your followers perhaps accept what you are narrating is true since they trust the fact that they have related to you some point. This is called “truth effects” in marketing theory [11]. Hence truth effects point out message receiver’s tendency to believe the repeated messages and in fact some cases accept the message as true whether the claim is made in advertising message is true or not [16]. Thus, with the increase in your “reach” numbers, which equates to the number of followers in this context, you might also help others to disseminate “truth effects.” Thus, the truth is not truth just because some followers like his/her influencer who might be a good entertainer, social influencer, or an attractive personality but not an expert on the subject. This is a very dangerous and disturbing path that creates false truths or illusion of truth. In some forms, you can rewrite the reality by just repeat the same and misleading story over and over again. This is pictured with the truth effects line in Fig. 5.1 in which audience’s believability of claim increases as exposure increases. If your voice exposure gets convincing and believable just because you can create more followers and reach them effectively more often than any others, this means that your followers started living in your alternative universe as they believe everything you said. They are just living the alternative facts but not truth itself.

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Low

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Fig. 5.1 Advertising truth effect (Source Wirthwein [28])

The truth effects phenomenon also resonates with Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s master propagandist, famous quote: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Thus, if you have enough advertisement money you can change the truth the way you want. This also sits at the heart of recent CNN commercials in which they show a simple banana and say: “Somebody can tell you this is not a banana. They can tell you this is an apple. But that does not change the fact that this is a banana.” However, the truth effects might not be observed in followers who are highly involved into the subject matter and have strong feelings or perhaps knowledge about the issue. They either turn off their cognitive abilities to receive the message and your voice, or they develop counterarguments against you to restore the truth as it is. It is also possible that some followers do their homework and see the truth and eventually decided to unfollow your idea of truth.

Quality of Voice Quantity is a sheer number and does not tell much about the person you follow other than their popularity. In other words, quantity does not tell too much about character and personality of the person you follow, or the unique characteristics of the person’s digital voice. The quality of voice can be more evident when the influencer you follow becomes your follower. These people are also called “Top Voices” who are trendsetters and shape the conversations in the majority of digital

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platforms. Imagine a well-known celebrity who has millions of followers such as Ashton Kutcher, a top voice or a major influencer, saw your post, and liked it and decided to follow you. How would that influence your status and number of your followers in the Twitter or any other social networking site? Or I should ask: Would that be any differences between him following you back and me following you back? My followback probably adds no or perhaps one person in your followers’ list and perhaps creates not much attention and change in your status and number of people sees your post. But, if Ashton Kutcher follows you, millions who followed him will see that you are liked and followed by him. In other words, your influencer has just redirected some of his traffic to you over his domain and gives your voice a legitimate recognition. This eventually stimulates some of his followers to start seeing you as a potential person to be a friend with or perhaps a person of a new influencer in the future. Simply put, if your influencer liked your post, then there should be something in you that deserve his/her and his/her followers’ attention. As if your influencer gave you a social legitimacy and an approval that your voice should be recognized, promoted, and perhaps followed, then eventually attention to your voice will rise. That has economic value for an advertiser as well since your status changed. Contrary, if your influencer unfollows you this means that your voice has no qualities and hence there is no value to follow you, hence your silence is much more appreciated than your voice at that point. Hence, your voice has no economic value in advertisement market. Such act of rejection can have deep social impact on the followers as he/she loses all the connections he/she can reach conveniently in the influencer’s account. That rejection means loss of face, might even generate disgruntled feelings. Therefore, if there are specific qualities in your voice such as knowledge, expertise, authenticity, integrity and last but not the least, honesty, then your voice has high quality and you are followed [8, 29, 20]. Further, quality of the pictures, videos, and hence the content of what is voiced in the social media can also directly influence the quality of voice. Some of influencers has millions of followers (called “macro influencer”) because of their celebrity status while some other has thousands of followers (called “micro” or “nano influencer”) [10] as they deal with a small group of niche communities. For example, Instagram defines an influencer who has less than 10,000 followers as micro-influencer, and between 10,000 to one million followers as macro-influencer [5].

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Micro-influencers are different than traditional endorsers and/or macroinfluencers who generally gained their celebrity status through traditional media. In the contrary, micro-influencers generally earned their statues by producing likeable and relatable personalities in the social media. Thus, they were originally born in this new digital media platform. This, in turn, recently created a new form of marketing, which is called “Influencer Marketing” as such influencers started to act as new type of third-party and independent influencers in the markets [9]. Now, such influencers have ability to influence conversations in their alley by providing good quality of voice. Many cases, influencers provide value by developing high quality of arguments [29] for the consumption of their followers as well as public. As more and more consumers started to use such influencers as an information source and follow them in their social networking sites, company-generated advertisements started losing its voice power and hence are being less relied on in today’s digital age [3]. Furthermore, such micro-influencers have a potential to generate brand awareness and reaching new audiences [20] as more and more consumers started to feel the same level trustworthy relationships with these influencers and see them as their friends even though they don’t have direct relationship [25]. In this context, some research claims that influencer marketing could be eleven times more on ROI compared to traditional marketing techniques [15]. Micro-influencers are good at keeping the small segments of public’s pulse and drive conversation regarding the issues that matter for their followers because they are personable and relatable. Although followers are aware that some influencers are also supported by the company whose brand is promoted, consumer engagement into market message is still higher than traditional media tools [15]. With the increasing consumer engagement, it is likely that these influencers might also push the brand loyalty levels into new highs. Micro-influencers authentic and friendly approach can also help other consumers to build a tightly knitted brand communities and consumption tribes in which consumption patterns determined by the influencer’s leadership. That is one of the major factors why companies hire influencers to reach to such undiscovered consumer markets. The loyal followers could turn to be the biggest advocates of the influencers and the brands they promote. Thus, it can be pointed out that there are two layers of loyalty here: loyalty to influencer and to the brand. The success depends on the degree of which influencer’s ability

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Micro-influencer

Fig. 5.2 Macro vs micro influencer interaction flow

to generate brand awareness and loyalty through followers who loyal to him/her. Loyal followers would “like” influencer’s every post and involve in his/her discussions, hence engage, and hear what influencer says unlike deaf and blind bots that follow some influencers with a habitual manner or with less consciousness. In fact, some loyal followers would buy into products influencers promoted without even doing research into product and the company. This indicates ultimate loyalty to the influencer, not a product/brand. This mostly happened with celebrity or macro-influencers. For example, when Brand Favre promotes blue jeans even though he is not a fashion expert, many of his followers likely buy the jeans he promotes. It seems it is not necessary to be expert when macro-influencers are promoting the product, but this is not the case for micro-influencers as also pictured in Fig. 5.2. Furthermore, highly loyal followers would share macro-influencer’s posts, hence spread the voice to recruit new followers to create brand awareness and loyalty. Majority of followers of micro-influencers are specifically follow them because of their expertise not their fame. They are more into the products and brands rather than influencer himself or herself. They might have a brand awareness and want to learn more about the product and brand and hence they find micro-influencer in that way. In fact, loyalty to brand and product might even turn into loyalty to micro-influencer if the influencer impacts the consumer with his/her expertise, knowledge, and passion about the product/brand as indicated with dotted lines in Fig. 5.2. Thus, loyalty to the brands that were promoted by the follower might also reach new levels by mediating effects of the loyalty to the influencers. On the contrary, less loyal followers might prefer to do research before buying the products promoted by the influencer. This, in turn, indicates the commitment to the brand not the influencer. Thus, there is trade-off between influencers and brands that were created by companies. If a micro-influencer promotes a well-known and more valuable brand in

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his/her digital space, he/she might be benefited from brand’s fame, and if a macro-influencer promotes a unknown and less valuable brand, then the brand benefited from macro-influencer’s fame to build brand awareness and perhaps future brand loyalty. As a result, degree of loyalty to the influencer and the product can also shape the format of product search behaviors of consumer and the power of the influencer over company and the brand, and vice versa. On the other hand, being influencer come with responsibility for a society. The influencer must declare if he/she is paid by the company for the product he/she is promoting in her/his digital channel according to new FTC rules. This eventually helps followers to differentiate genuine and authentic influencers’ intent from a paid influencer’s promotions so that consumers do not make misleading presumptions before purchasing the products/services. The new FTC rules make sure that such misleading representations protect consumer welfare by providing as reliable and trustworthy information as possible for consumers. Similarly, some social networking sites such as Instagram has also developed a standardized disclosure process for its influencers so that followers can easily see which influencers are gaining a commercial benefit by promoting the product and brand. A research showed that such disclosures positively influenced followers brand recall, intention to engage in with the brand post [5] as well as brand attractiveness [14]. In another research, it is found that when micro-influencers declare potential commercial partnership with the brand, the followers have higher intention to purchase the product compared to macro-influencer who does not disclose such partnership [14]. Similarly, an influencer can also bring some risks to the company that is working with the influencer for marketing impact. Companies do not have ultimate control over influencer like they have in advertisements and other traditional marketing promotion tools. Thus, if influencer unconsciously uses wrong language and words that turn his/her followers off, that might ruin the company’s reputation and the value of the brand used by the influencer as such brand would be directly associated with the influencer himself/herself. This, in fact, creates brand switching behavior rather than brand loyalty. Furthermore, if the brand strongly associated with the influencer by the followers, the company could lose total control over brand’s identity and image. Followers have an influencer portfolio, like newspaper pages such as sport, economy, politics subsections. Thus, followers follow a specific

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person for a specific reason. In other words, some follows Ashton Kutcher, who has millions of followers, just to hear from him, and hence Aston’s social influence [29] and celebrity status plays a significant role in the follower’s decision. But the same followers can also follow an ordinary guy who has a couple of thousands of followers that gives advices to people about how to build model planes for their kids and where to buy the best materials for their next project. If you, as a company, want to access to masses, you probably want to hire Ashton Kutcher’s voice or advertise in his Twitter account. But if you want to reach a small segment niche market, then you might want to talk with the model plane guy. Thus, the number of followers could be less important than the quality of voice in some circumstances to reach the right audience. Research showed that followers who are exposed to micro-influencers are more knowledgeable about the products promoted [14], thus the quality of voice could be more important factor for micro-influencers than macro-influencers. In other words, micro-influencers can build up themselves online communities they surround themselves with. Their voices are used as tickets by companies to enter such desired consumer universes. Thus, from marketing point of view, micro-influencers’ voice is good for targeted communications while macro-influencers’ voice is good when you are communicating with masses. In other words, micro-influencers can generally provide depth and more advanced expertise while macroinfluencers provide breadth or general knowledge to their followers, and these influencer communications are always intercepted by the companies to transmit their own branding message to consumers for money and gifts. In the end, either a celebrity, a macro-influencer, who voices millions or a simple guy, micro-influencer, who shares his opinions with his niche, they all trusted and closely followed by followers because of the power and quality of the ideas and arguments they generated in their own universes. Overall, the quality of voice is also another reason behind the number of followers an influencer has. And, both quantity of followers and quality of voice are economic value indicators of voice as they create high visibility to companies in today’s social media environments in the race of being close to consumers.

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Tone of Voice Another very important and effective voice element that needs to be discussed is the tone of voice. Some voice is perceived as more “human-like” while some others perhaps more mechanic, cold, or official “business-like.” The voice that sounds like a human voice can be perceived as more natural, pleasant, and clear during a communication process with the message receiver [13]. This eventually stimulates message receivers and the followers to engage in a conversation comfortably. Not only “physical voice” such as physical human voice or cat voice but also written or “narrative voice” we use in documents such as Sockington’s social media posts or a business letter you write to your supplier will all be considered as voice in this section’s context. The research showed that physical tone of voice can create an emotional connection with a person who cannot, otherwise, really detect nuances in a voice that was in a written format [22]. The recent popularity of voice-shopping systems, such as Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, is a good example of how effective a physical human voice can get in a communication process with consumers. The goal of such voice-shopping systems is integrating human voice into machines to create a comfortable communication options between humans and machines as if humans are talking with a real person rather than a machine. Thus, if the right voice chemistry was not developed between humans and machines, communication quality might not be perceived as comfortable as human-to-human communications; and hence, consumers reject such technology as such voice can be perceived as machine-like cold and distance voice. In other words, voice will be as valuable as the emotions that they can be able to carry and transfer to their receivers, in this case consumers as human beings. As a result, consumers started now to be placing their order by talking with such voice assistant systems partly because it is easy and soothing to talk with someone rather than a machine or simply typing your order in a little screen of your smartphone or your personal computer. Such devices answer your comments back with human voice, and that increases the humanness nature of these machines, which in turn create an artificial feeling of humanness. Most recently, Pandora started to experiment voice-enabled ads or interactive voice ads [37]. The listener can simply say yes or no to the streaming ads while a person listens to music in his/her earbuds and the ad either goes away or continue depending on

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your answer. This is like asking your loved one to push the mute button in a commercial break while watching your favorite TV show. Clearly, these voice-shopping tools improve the quality of interaction between consumers no matter when and where they prefer, either when you are talking with a family member inside your home or when you are driving somewhere [38]. These voice assistant tools talk with a natural human voice, make jokes like real humans, and take your orders like a real employee. For a long time, we all wonder who is behind Alexa’s physical voice. Or why does Alexa have a feminine voice not a masculine, or a manly voice. A research on vocal attractiveness also found that male voices sounded more forceful while female voice is sounded as more soothing and persuasive than male voice [39, 40]. This, eventually, enhances user’s acceptance of the voice-shopping tools. Such machines who mimic human voice rise the humanness of such technology at a level that can be easily accepted by consumers, which I call this “artificial voice.” These machines are candidate to be your new family member as a result of the increasing humanization process of machines. Perhaps we are trading our privacy for the sake of convenience and better consumer services though the voices we feel comfortable and secure. Such voice assistant tools are getting better every day as artificial intelligence systems learn more about us, and our needs and feelings. This eventually leads very high predictability of consumer habits and routines, and hence makes it easier for consumer demand forecasting. But all these indicate the power and the importance of human voice or human-like voices in today’s dynamically changing voice-marketing world. On the other hand, there is another important voice element is “narrative voice” which is also discussed in the first chapter. Narrative voice indicates the voice we used when we post our comments and ideas in our social networking sites and blogs. Majority of the voice actually is mostly narrative voice in today’s digital world, and it seems like it is going to be that way for a long time. Although we read daily many things in our little screens, we sometimes have hard time to figure out if there is a human behind comment posted or some surprising personality. In this context, each word we used while texting your friend or posting our views in your social network tells something about you, your emotional state, your identity, gender, and hence carry very humanly features unless created by a bot or a cat such as Sockington. The question is which kind of words and/or voice tone can be seen comforting or human-like and formal. Majority of emotional words used in these communications could be perceived

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more human-like as they evoke sincerer emotions in the reader’s mind. We assume that machines have no emotions and feelings and hence it would be easier for a receiver to figure out if there is a human soul behind that voice or not in some degree. This, in turn, determines the tone of your voice, either human-like or machine-like or business-like formal tone. We generally deal or sometimes struggle with business-like voice of tone when we are having a hard time with a company. As discussed in complaint research, every consumer who is going through hard time with the company expects some level of empathy. If the company continues to communicate without empathy and follows repetitive company policies and rules all the time, that voice cannot be perceived as human-like even though the person who voiced that voice was a human being. If we go back to Sockington case for a minute, you will see that that little cat provides emotional comfort to his followers even though we all know that Sockington is a cat or a person who sees the world from a cat’s view with a humanly sarcasm. Sockington’s voice provides comfort like a human voice that touches our soul. That is why eventually Sockington attracts his followers’ attention and engagement as she has a very humanly and warm voice. The more the followers associate Sockington’s voice with their lives, problems, and hence themselves, the more receptive people get toward whatever she has voiced. Thus, Sockington’s followers are ready to open their minds and hearts to the ideas that were raised with her voice. Furthermore, Sockington does not sound taking herself very seriously as he does not follow any formal and business-like language. Well, he is a cat and cats do not take themselves seriously. In other words, there are some significant differences between the language used by Sockington and your financial advisor. Today, general company voice is generally perceived as bureaucratic, mechanic, formal, and in fact cold sometimes. Some of today’s companies are trying hard to break this icy cold approach, as they know that they cannot reach every consumer with a formal business language. Although corporations implemented various personification and humanization techniques into their brands in the past, what Sockington did is more than simple brand personification or anthropomorphism. It is just being yourself and talking with the other side through honest yourself with more humanly tone even though you are talking in the embodiment of a cat. Thus, sincere human tone of voice can go beyond any anthropomorphism efforts. The idea of a cat talks and thinks like human makes the

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conversation interesting and attract attention as discussed earlier. It will not be wrong to indicate that human-like voice would be considered as today’s social media language. In the social media, it is almost impossible to receive a response to traditional and formal corporate tone of voice anymore unless you are a master of formal languages such as a lawyer who can easily figure out what you are trying the say between the lines. The difference between human-like and business-like voice is as wide as talking with a friend at a café and a policeman or a judge at the courthouse. Thus, Sockington’s informal, causal, and conversational language is able to set an emotional tone which is defined as human voice, not a cat voice, while corporate voice is defined as more formal, distance, and bureaucratical language that is not aimed at developing interaction and conversation with consumers.

Consumer Voice Engagement The research supports the effectiveness of human voice on consumercompany relationships in the digital world. Findings indicated that humanized voice could increase in consumer engagement [24], create (positive) evaluation of company’s brand [27], and even increase consumers’ purchase intentions [4]. This engagement reveals itself as more likes, posts, and follows in today’s digital platforms. Thus, the more voice is sounded like human, the more convincing and effective it gets to its listeners and followers, and hence the voice receives more likes and follows or combinations of all. More “likes,” “shares,” “retweets,” and “follows” mean that your voice has an economic value in the market. Hence, the tone of human voice can economically be seen more valuable than formal business-like or machine-like voice as majority of consumers react better to human-like voice in the social media. Interestingly, research also showed that positive voice can also be associated with human-like voice while negative voice can be associated with more corporate-like or rule-based tone especially in hedonic shopping when there are low situational purchase risks [4]. In a hedonic shopping process, consumers are generally looking for fun and entertaining shopping experiences and environments [1, 2]. Humanlike voice creates feelings of connectedness and sociability [4]. Thus, social media is a perfect platform for these kinds of shopping experiences [12, 18, 23] as it is easy to socialize and find many entertaining features created by other like-minded consumers as the information gained in the social

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media is not standard, impersonal, or boring business-like statements. If a contributor follows these kinds of standard format, that voice becomes numbing and worthless in the social media. On the other hand, in a utilitarian shopping process, in which goal-oriented, concrete, and planned cognitive processes are dominant [21, 23], efficiency is more important. In a utilitarian shopping, consumers want to get maximum information with less effort in a shopping process. The return of economic shopping value, which can be defined as gain the necessary product/service information in a short and efficient way to complete a shopping process, is determining factor for the utilitarian shopper. This, in fact, is the area where digital world provided many empowering tools to the shoppers with search engines and third-party sites [17]. In this context, utilitarian shoppers might not be attracted by human-like tone of voice developed in social media, but rather influenced by results-oriented digital tools such as search engines (ranking of best matching product/service) and third-party numeric review scores (numeric performance evaluation of products/services by the other consumers) [18] as the information gained from these sources can be perceived as more result-oriented and hence concrete. One could say that social media provides more qualitative and authentic information to followers while search engines and third-party sources provide quantitative and results-oriented voice. I also need to emphasize that every social networking site has different purposes in the social media. For example, if you post a naughty joke that you generally share with your family and close friends in Facebook in your LinkedIn page, then your connections will probably not engage in your voice the way they do for others who use more formal voice. Although LinkedIn is not a platform for products/service suggestions, more business-like voice receives better response than human-like response there as this site is more like a professional networking site. Furthermore, the research also showed that if such human-like voice expresses more negative views, humanness of voice can get weakening and/or humanness factor diminishes away while more positive voice continues to increase the creation of positive feelings [4]. The same research showed that a negative voice on the brand’s page might not totally eliminate humanness of voice while positive voice might still be perceived as human voice. This, in turn, also increases follower’s purchase intentions. In this context, the findings of the same research support that when there was a low situational involvement and risks, which is the case in many of hedonic product/services, human-like voice is more preferred

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than business-like voice [4]. On the other hand, when there was a high situational involvement to the product/service and high risks, businesslike voice seems more effective. Under these circumstances, human-like voice has limited and negligible impact on utilitarian shoppers. Overall, the dichotomous perspective between human-like voice and business-like voice defines the fundamental components of “tone of voice.” In general, when tone of voice was business-like and/or negative, consumers’ and followers’ engagement in what is voiced will be at the lowest level, especially in the social media. On the other hand, consumer engagement could rise when an ordinary conversation initiator, an influencer, or a company use human-like and positive voice in the social media. Business-like formal voice is the second-best option outside the social media. Thus, the higher the degree of perception of humanness of voice is, the higher economic value can be expected in the voice is social media. This, in turn, explains the supply side of voiceconomics as tone of voice points out on how to supply an engaging and a convincing voice that attracts more followers and consumers in the social media. This eventually generates economic value for conversation initiators, influencers, companies, and all the consumers who want to raise their voices for social recognition in this attention economy. The creation of a right message with right tone of voice will eventually generate more “likes” and “followers,” thus demand to a voice, and hence economic power to the creator of the voice. This, basically, is how voiceconomics is generally working in today’s challenging and dynamically changing digital consumption places. As a result, it is fair to say that not every voice is a free product anymore in today’s world. In the past, companies were the sole suppliers of market voice with their media dominance that shape the consumption patterns. Not anymore. The balance started to shift toward today’s consumer voice suppliers and influencers who eventually determine the value of market voice, which also requires trustworthy, responsible, and human-like messaging.

References 1. Arnold, Mark J., and Kristy E. Reynolds. 2003. Hedonic Shopping Motivations. Journal of Retailing 79 (2): 77–95. 2. Babin, Barry J., William R. Darden, and Mitch Griffin. 1994. Work and/or Fun: Measuring Hedonic and Utilitarian Shopping Value. Journal of Consumer Research 20 (4): 644–656.

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3. Backaler, Joel. 2018. Then vs. Now: Influencer Marketing (Re-)defined. In Digital Influence. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 4. Barcelos, Renato Hübner, Danilo C. Dantas, and Sylvain Sénécal. 2018. Watch Your Tone: How a Brand’s Tone of Voice on Social Media Influences Consumer Responses. Journal of Interactive Marketing 41 (February): 60– 80. 5. Boerman, Sophie C. 2020. The Effects of the Standardized Instagram Disclosure for Micro-and Meso-Influencers. Computers in Human Behavior 103: 199–207. 6. Confessore, Nicholas, Gabriel J.X. Dance, Richard Harris, and Mark Hansen. 2018. The follower factory. The New York Times, 27. 7. De Veirman, Marijke, Veroline Cauberghe, and Liselot Hudders. 2017. Marketing Through Instagram Influencers: The Impact of Number of Followers and Product Divergence on Brand Attitude. International Journal of Advertising 36 (5): 798–828. 8. Djafarova, Elmira, and Chloe Rushworth. 2017. Exploring the Credibility of Online Celebrities’ Instagram Profiles in Influencing the Purchase Decisions of Young Female Users. Computers in Human Behavior 68: 1–7. 9. Freberg, Karen, Kristin Graham, Karen McGaughey, and Laura A. Freberg. 2011. Who Are the Social Media Influencers? A Study of Public Perceptions of Personality. Public Relations Review 37 (1): 90–92. 10. Hall, John. 2015. Build Authentic Audience Experiences Through Influencer Marketing. Forbes. 11. Hawkins, Scott A., and Stephen J. Hoch. 1992. Low-Involvement Learning: Memory Without Evaluation. Journal of Consumer Research 19 (2): 212– 225. 12. Hughes, Christian, Vanitha Swaminathan, and Gillian Brooks. 2019. Driving Brand Engagement Through Online Social Influencers: An Empirical Investigation of Sponsored Blogging Campaigns. Journal of Marketing 83 (5): 78–96. 13. Ilves, Mirja, and Veikko Surakka. 2012. Subjective Responses to Synthesised Speech with Lexical Emotional Content: The Effect of the Naturalness of the Synthetic Voice. Behaviour & Information Technology 32 (2): 117–131. 14. Kay, Samantha, Rory Mulcahy, and Joy Parkinson. 2020. When Less Is More: The Impact of Macro and Micro Social Media Influencers’ Disclosure. Journal of Marketing Management 36 (3/4): 248–278. 15. Kirkpatrick, David. 2016. Influencer Marketing Spurs 11 Times the ROI Over Traditional Tactics: Study. Marketing Dive. https://www.market ingdive.com/news/influencer-marketing-spurs-11-times-the-roi-over-tradit ional-tactics-study/416911/. Visited on May 26, 2020. 16. Kucuk, S. Umit. 2016. Visualizing Marketing: From Abstract to Intuitive. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

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17. Kucuk, S. Umit, and Sandeep Krishnamurthy. 2007. An Analysis of Consumer Power on the Internet. Technovation 27 (1/2): 47–56. 18. Li, Jingjing, Ahmed Abbasi, Amar Cheema, and Linda B. Abraham. 2020. Path to Purpose? How Online Customer Journeys Differ for Hedonic Versus Utilitarian Purchases. Journal of Marketing, Forthcoming. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0022242920911628. 19. Lewis, J. David, and Andrew J. Weigert. 1985. Social Atomism, Holism, and Trust. Sociological Quarterly 26 (4): 455–471. 20. Lou, Chen, and Shupei Yuan. 2019. Influencer Marketing: How Message Value and Credibility Affect Consumer Trust of Branded Content on Social Media. Journal of Interactive Advertising 19 (1): 58–73. 21. Mathwick, Charla, Naresh Malhotra, and Edward Rigdon. 2001. Experiential Value: Conceptualization, Measurement and Application in the Catalog and Internet Shopping Environment. Journal of Retailing 77 (1): 39–56. 22. Pagani, Margherita, Margot Racat, and Charles F. Hofacker. 2019. Adding Voice to the Omnichannel and How That Affects Brand Trust. Journal of Interactive Marketing 48 (November): 89–105. 23. Park, Eunho, Rishika Rishika, Ramkumar Janakiraman, Mark B. Houston, and Byungjoon Yoo. 2018. Social Dollars in Online Communities: The Effect of Product, User, and Network Characteristics. Journal of Marketing 82 (1): 93–114. 24. Schamari, Julia, and Tobias Schaefers. 2015. Leaving the Home Turf: How Brands Can Use Webcare on Consumer-Generated Platforms to Increase Positive Consumer Engagement. Journal of Interactive Marketing 30: 20– 33. 25. Swant, Marty. 2016. Twitter Says Users Now Trust Influencers Nearly as Much as Their Friends. Adweek, May 10. http://www.adweek.com/dig ital/twitter-says-users-now-trust-influencers-nearly-much-their-friends-171 367/. Visited on May 26, 2020. 26. Urban, L. Glen, Fareena Sultan, and J. William Qualls. 2000. Placing Trust at the Center of Your Internet Strategy. Sloan Management Review 42 (1): 39–48. 27. Van Noort, Guda, and Lotte M. Willemsen. 2012. Online Damage Control: The Effects of Proactive versus Reactive Webcare Interventions in Consumer-generated and Brand-generated Platforms. Journal of Interactive Marketing 26 (3): 131–140. 28. Wirthwein, Chris. 2008. Brand Busters: 7 Common Mistakes Marketers Make. New York: Paramount Market Publishing Inc. 29. Xiao, Min, Rang Wang, and Sylvia Chan-Olmsted. 2018. Factors Affecting YouTube Influencer Marketing Credibility: A Heuristic-Systematic Model. Journal of Media Business Studies 15 (3): 188–213. 30. https://twitter.com/SOCKSARMY.

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31. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockington. 32. https://web.archive.org/web/20090709003107/http://today.msnbc. msn.com/id/30868712/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/. 33. https://guestofaguest.com/new-york/twitter/how-ashton-kutcher-got-to1-millionyou-cant-unfollow-him. 34. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/socialmedia-bots.html?mtrref=undefined. 35. https://www.forbes.com/sites/cherylsnappconner/2018/01/28/fake-fol lowers-expose-on-devumi-spurs-backlash-on-social-medias-black-market/# 4f5b151d2109. 36. https://www.randombyte.com/7-reasons-why-you-are-losing-twitter-follow ers/. 37. https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/interactive-voice-ads-pandora? utm_medium=email&utm_source=transactional&utm_campaign=ContentNewsletter. 38. https://www.cbinsights.com/research/voice-shopping/. 39. https://theharrispoll.com/are-consumers-more-responsive-to-male-or-fem ale-voices-in-advertisements-03-12-2010/. 40. https://www.matinee.co.uk/blog/difference-male-female-voice/.

Conclusion

Voice is a socially oriented concept because it requires participation, resistant, and show off existential power of being there. Without existence of voice, there will be no social or economic progress as every society is fed by ideas, opinions, and new thoughts that focus on solutions and pushes societies innovativeness to strength individuals and social welfare. If you cut such a feeding tube, you will eventually be dealing with a social entropy or a slowly dying society and economy. From sociopolitical point of view, voice is a great social equalizer as it provides equal chances to each citizen to exercise their participatory rights such as voting and protesting. Without individual’s democratic participation and equalization of the voice to share ideas and complaints with society, you create misophonic society and hence there will be no social order established in which society as whole can respect and follow. This is the very essence of the freedom of speech and expression where it is entitled as the first amendment of the constitution. No matter how much disturbing the ideas gets or reverses your individual value system, every individual should be free to voice their concerns as long as they are respectful to everybody’s rights and beliefs. Such voice is eventually the reflection of the part of society’s reality. This also guarantees that no one single individual can change or impact the outcomes of the society’s overall wish. From this point of view, protection of individual voice eventually guarantees the society’s well-being.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. U. Kucuk, Consumer Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53983-2

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Similarly, consumer voice is integral part of society and its value creation processes. Consumer voice has also been going through similar struggles with company-generated marketing voice throughout the consumption history. With the recent developments in communication technologies and social networking systems, consumer voice now can be heard loudly and impactfully in today’s voicedictive societies. In fact, consumers can be seen as noise source in today’s digital platforms. They are talking all the time and spreading their ideas and raising their voice which can be heard at the deepest corners of the digital universe. This noisy yet creative voice is the loudest voice we have ever witnessed in consumption places so far. The trend indicates that the consumer voice will continue to reach high decimals and consumer plurality will gain more power over company marketing voice. Thus, the people who do not understand the voicesumer, the newly evolving today’s consumer, and the value he/she creates will eventually fall behind this century’s realities, and perhaps the progress of the future.Voicesumer reminds us that when there is consumer silence, there will be no progress in markets. Consumer silence only works for monopolists who autocratically dictate market value mostly for profit. Yet, consumer voice can also be bribed and polluted by for-profit organizations which put consumer voice’s authenticity, legitimacy, and reliability in jeopardy. Consumer voice works better for pluralist as it creates equality, fairness, and public consciousness in markets. Consumer voice is the ultimate economic equalizer, and definitive source of market value creation processes in today’s digital age. Thus, if someone raises voice to silence you with their noise, do not be silent. Raise your voice back and be voicesumer, and do not let such noise to create confusion, economic inequality, and unfair value distribution for others. Market democracy is dependent on voicesumers who have pure and authentic consumer voice more than ever.

Index

A Abu Ghraib, 54 active, 7, 25, 28, 38, 40, 78, 81, 87 actual noise, 12 addictive, 47, 48 Alexa, 109, 110 Amazon, 71–73 anthropomorphism, 111 artificial voice, 110 attention, viii, 9, 11, 13, 36, 39, 49, 52, 57, 60, 62, 63, 65, 66, 97–101, 104, 111, 112 attention economy, 60, 81, 114 audience, 14, 36, 52, 59–64, 66, 75, 86, 99, 100, 102, 105, 108 authenticity, 17, 33, 53, 104, 120 autocratic, 24, 120 awareness, 3, 9, 53, 62, 80, 81, 87, 88, 97 B balanced voice, 29, 61 betrayal, 84 boisterous, 49–51, 58, 60, 63, 64, 66

brand, 81–83, 87, 89, 105–107, 113 brand attractiveness, 107 brand awareness, 80–82, 87, 105–107 brand hate, 76, 89 brand image, 88, 90, 107 brand recall, 107 bridge, 87 business-like, 109, 111–114 C celebrity, 36, 56, 89, 98, 104–106, 108 channel of message, 61, 66 CNN, 100, 103 collective voice, 26 communication, 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 22, 23, 26, 30, 36, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 79, 82, 83, 85–88, 96, 99, 102, 108–110 conscience, 16 consumer, vii, viii, 15, 17–19, 21–33, 35–40, 49, 52, 53, 55, 59, 66, 67, 73–90, 96–99, 102, 105, 107–114, 120

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. U. Kucuk, Consumer Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53983-2

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INDEX

consumer attention, 53, 81 Consumer Bill of Right, 25 consumer citizen, 30, 32, 39 consumer engagement, 59, 105, 112, 114 consumer power, 29, 32, 33, 39, 76 consumer silence, 24, 31, 84, 120 consumer voice, vii, viii, 18, 19, 23–28, 30–40, 53, 54, 57, 60, 64, 74–78, 85, 87, 89, 90, 99, 114, 120 consumption, vii, 18, 24, 26–29, 31, 36, 38, 40, 73, 90, 96, 105 credibility, 60, 79, 86 crowd opinion, 77 culture, 7, 44, 64, 77 cyberspace, 29, 34 D definitional, 43, 64 demand, 22, 28, 83, 97, 99, 101, 114 democratic, viii, 23, 30, 34, 44, 74, 119 Devumi, 101 digital divide (DD), 31, 35 digital economy, 78, 81, 90 digitalization, 35 digital platform, 17, 18, 34, 48, 66, 73, 86, 88, 99, 104, 112, 120 digital vigilantism, 39 digital world, 15–18, 29, 31, 34, 35, 45–49, 62, 76, 86, 87, 89, 98, 100, 112, 113 direct consumer voice, 74, 76, 82, 85 disloyal, 88 dissatisfaction, 49, 58, 75–77, 83, 87 doxing, 39 E easy action, 83 economic system, 19, 23

economic value, 96–100, 104, 108, 112, 114 economizing, 97 Einstein, Albert, 36 Einstein Voice, 36 electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM), 32, 85–87, 89, 90 emoji, 15, 18, 46 emotional, 46, 47, 54, 61, 64, 109–112 emotional appeal, 64, 66 endogenous WOM, 88–90 engagement, 111, 112 entertainment, 66 entertainment value, 65 evolution, vii, 6, 23, 24, 30, 38 existence, 1–5, 22, 38, 62, 88, 119 Exit, 27–30, 34 exit-based consumer power, 29 exogenous WOM, 88, 89 expectations, 2, 23, 36, 58, 98 external locus, 76

F Facebook, 66, 73, 100, 102, 113 fake, 11, 16, 60, 79, 100, 101 Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 34, 89, 107 feminine voice, 110 filtering, 15, 17, 37 first amendment, 32, 44, 57, 119 follow, 44, 65, 98–101, 103–107, 119 follow back, 100, 104 follower, viii, 56, 59, 61, 95–109, 111–114 followers farm, 101 free speech rights, 32, 34 frequency, 9, 11, 13, 46, 101 friendly, 22, 46, 60, 61, 63, 64, 75, 98, 105

INDEX

123

G Google Images, 50–52, 55, 57 groupthink, 53

K Kennedy, J.F., 25 Kutcher, Ashton, 100, 104, 108

H hate, 8, 55, 60, 61, 72, 73, 75, 85 hate seeding, 57, 61 heard voice, 47 high pitch, 8, 9 hiker, 80 Hirschman, A., 26, 28, 34 homodigitus, 46 House Impeachment Trials, 56 human-like, 109–114

L legal, 22, 30, 32, 84 legalized voice, 26 legitimized voice, 26 like, 98, 99, 102, 106, 112, 114 LinkedIn, 66, 100, 113 literal noise, 12 literal voice, 47, 49 logic, 55, 57, 59–61, 66, 79 loud, 2, 9, 12, 22, 46, 49, 52 loyal consumer, 29, 32, 33, 74, 76, 83, 87, 88 loyal follower, 105, 106 loyalty, 106, 107

I ignorance, 6–8 impression, 60, 82, 101, 102 impulsive, 8, 16–18, 46, 57 indirect communication, 85 indirect consumer voice, 82–85, 88, 90 individualism, 77 influencer marketing, 105 information quality, 86 information quantity, 86 information transmission, 86 initiator, 98, 99, 114 inner self, 14, 15 inner voice, 5, 14–18 Instagram, 104, 107 intelligence, 4, 6, 23 interactive voice ads, 109 internalization, 16 internal locus, 76 Internet era, 31, 32, 35 irrelevant, 8, 82

J joyful ride, 53

M machine-like, 109, 111, 112 macro-influencer, 104, 106–108 made-silence, 5 manipulative, 101 market, vii, viii, 11, 18, 22–29, 31, 33, 35–40, 49, 53–55, 57, 73, 74, 76, 79, 80, 82, 84–90, 97, 99, 101, 104, 105, 108, 112, 120 market democracy, viii, 23, 85, 120 market era, 28 marketer-generated message, 53, 96, 98, 102 market relationship, 23, 25, 27 masculine voice, 110 McCain, John, 51, 53, 54 meaning, vii, 4, 6–8, 13, 15, 34, 38, 49, 58, 63, 64 message, 11–13, 27, 31, 33, 37, 40, 44, 46, 53, 56–58, 60–66, 74, 81, 97, 102, 103, 108, 114

124

INDEX

micro-influencer, 104–108 mind noise, 12, 13, 49 misleading, 25, 26, 57, 58, 61, 89, 98, 102, 107 misophonia, 8

N nano influencer, 104 narrative voice, 109, 110 negative, 8, 18, 22, 48, 49, 56, 58–61, 73–75, 77–81, 86, 90, 113, 114 Negative Double Jeopardy (NDJ), 88 negative tweet, 88 negative voice, 13, 26, 58, 60, 112, 113 negativity bias, 61, 74, 88 New York Times, 101 noise, 2, 5, 8–14, 37, 40, 49, 51, 55–57, 64, 120 noise-free voice, 13, 97 noise pollution, 8 noisy era, 40 Nomophobia, 48 nonexistence, 4, 6, 10, 24 normative evaluation, 77 nothingness, 2, 4–8, 10, 22 number of follower, 98–102, 108 numeric consumer voice, 77, 78

O obstreperous, 49–51, 55, 58, 60, 61, 64, 66 online consumer rating, 77 online consumer review, 77

P paid bloggers, 33, 74 paid consumer voice, 33 passive, 7, 8, 22, 24, 38, 74, 86, 87

personality, 3, 43, 57, 64, 83, 102, 103, 110 personification, 52, 53, 96, 111 persuasiveness, 87 physical voice, 5, 14–18, 109, 110 physical world, 15, 17, 18, 45–47, 49 polluted voice, 120 poor voice, 13 positive, 7, 22, 23, 48, 49, 58–61, 63, 73–75, 77–83, 112 positive voice, 26, 51, 58–60, 74, 75, 112–114 power, 21, 22, 24, 26–30, 32, 34–36, 38, 44, 62, 65, 66, 84–86, 88, 97, 99, 105, 107, 108, 110, 114, 119, 120 power distance, 77 presumed, 28 prison of war (POW), 54 privacy, 39, 110 private response, 83, 84 production, 24, 25, 32, 33, 87 production era, 24, 28 prosumer, 32, 54 psychological biases, 78 pure meaning, 14

Q quality of voice, 103–105, 108 quantity of followers, 108

R rating systems, 77–79 reach, 5, 8–11, 13, 14, 23, 27, 44, 57, 61–64, 76, 86, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102, 105, 106, 108, 111, 120 real-silence, 5, 10, 11 real time, 35–37, 46, 48

INDEX

receiver, 8–11, 13, 15, 38, 49, 53, 60, 74, 83, 85, 99, 101, 102, 109, 111 reciprocity bias, 100, 101 reflective market actor, 29 reputation, 58, 77, 80, 82, 107 revenge, 73, 75, 83, 84 ROI, 105 rule-based tone, 112

S sales, 25, 26, 80, 86, 88 sales era, 25 satisfaction, 33, 73, 77, 87 screams, 2, 3, 37, 38 second-level digital divide, 35 self-expression, 15 silence, 2, 4–12, 22, 49, 97 silently noisy, 12, 22, 46 singularity, 37 singularity era, 35, 37–39 Siri, 109 sleeper, 81 sleeper effect, 81 smartphone(s), 12, 17, 18, 35, 36, 44, 45, 47, 48, 57, 109 sociability, 112 social energy, 37 social equalizer, 44, 119 social justice, 58, 84 sociopolitical, 44, 119 Sockington, 95–98, 109–112 sound, vii, 2–6, 8–11, 13, 18, 37, 45, 46, 55, 59, 109 starter, 81, 82 Steiner, Peter, 96 strong tie, 87, 88 subvertisement, 34 supply, 97, 98, 114 symbolical self-completion, 15

125

T text, 18, 46, 77 textual consumer voice, 77 the Internet, 12, 16, 17, 28, 30, 31, 35, 47, 48, 50, 65, 76, 86, 96, 98 third-party response, 84, 85 tone of voice, 66, 67, 109, 111, 113, 114 true, 4, 16, 17, 28, 30, 33, 36, 39, 57, 60, 62, 65, 74, 80, 82, 89, 90, 96, 102 true self, 14 Trump, Donald, 11, 51, 55–57, 66 trust, 33, 55, 60, 84, 88, 90, 98, 102 truth effects, 102, 103 Twitter, 56, 57, 66, 95, 100, 102, 104, 108 Twitter Tantrums, 55

U Uber, 78 uncertainty avoidance, 77 underload voice, 13 unethical, 22, 25, 26, 31, 83 unfriendly, 60, 61, 63, 64 United Airlines (UA), 37, 38 utilitarian, 113, 114

V value, 3, 4, 7, 10–12, 15, 27, 29, 30, 33, 37, 53, 54, 57, 59, 62, 64, 73, 81, 97, 99, 102, 105, 107, 113, 120 value systems, vii, viii, 22, 30–32, 34, 39, 44, 59, 64, 90, 119 verbalize, 45 victimization, 84 vociferous, 3, 49–51, 53–55, 58, 60, 61, 64–66, 74

126

INDEX

voice, vii, 2–15, 17, 18, 22, 24–28, 30, 31, 34, 38–40, 43–46, 48, 49, 51–53, 55, 57, 59–67, 73–76, 85, 90, 95–104, 108–110, 112–114, 119, 120 voice addictive, 48, 56, 120 voice-based consumer power, 29, 32 voice domination, 37 voice economics, 97, 99, 114 voice-empowering, 67 voice-enabled ads, 109 voice equalization, 30, 31, 33, 38 voice response, 75, 76 voice-shopping, 109, 110 voicesumer, viii, 40, 45, 48–50, 58, 61–63, 66, 67, 100, 120 voice volume, 10, 11 volunteer, 33

watchdogs, 33, 85, 90 weak tie, 87, 88 weaponized visibility, 39 wear out, 11 White House (WH), 56, 57 wicked, 61 Williams, Robin, 51–53, 65 willingness to voice, 22 win-sin, 61 word-of-mouth (WOM), 32, 59, 85–89, 99 writing, 18, 30, 72, 77

W Washington, Denzel, 78

Z zero, 4, 10

Y YouTube, 66