Does Internet Democratize the Consumer? Is privacy a concern?

In Arun Sharma and Jagdish N Sheths’ article, the transition from traditional marketing to reverse marketing is initially highlighted. The traditional marketing theory mainly focuses on the products and services which the companies and firms can produce. The marketing target is to promote demand for the product (Sharma & Sheth 2004, P697). The reverse marketing focuses on customer side of the market. As the increasing influence of Internet Business, the manufactures began to stop sustaining producing and to seek the orders from customers. Therefore, as the author stated, the marketing has changed to “customer- centric” perspective (Sharma & Sheth 2004, P697). Based on the internet, the manufactures and companies could easily gather opinions from many customers and the individual order is also possible to be made. The customers now have opportunities to choose the products which mostly fit their needs. In some case, instead of comparing different existing products, the customers could design their own production style. For example, on some shoe makers’ website like Nike and Adidas, people can freely fill different colors on several types of shoes and order it through the website. As a result, the development trend of product and service will become more personalize.

In my opinion, privacy is a significant concern. People will disclose their personal information when they shopping on-line. The firms, on the other hand, obtain many people’s financial, medical, and social information. How they would use these information is a big question. Some firms trade their customers’ information as profitable product. Until there is universal agreement or regulation has been reached on the privacy of customer information by all companies, otherwise, privacy is always a concern.

Source：Arun Sharma and Jagdish Sheth (2004) Web-based markeing: The coming revolution in marketing thought and strategy, Journal of Business Research 57 696-702