I’ve always loved this bit about empowered consumers. Reads like it was written yesterday:
The dimensions of the latest trends in consumer behavior were outlined in an overview in the Harvard Business Review. This new zeitgeist, the august publication explained, is being fueled by “the efforts of consumers themselves,” who have lately “become articulate.” One of the defining features of this fresh paradigm is the new consumer’s “demand for information.” They are banding together, becoming “better educated and better organized,” with a “growing familiarity with the mechanics of advertising” and the endless range of gimmicky sales tactics. They have “suffered from deceptive and stupid advertising” long enough, and it is only inevitable that power should shift to them in an economy that has moved from scarcity to abundance. “These changes,” the article summarized, “have tended to make consumers more critical and to enhance their importance.” Such was the state of things . . . in 1939.
—Dr. John Kotter, Buy In
