Internet Technologies as a Tool for Consumer Empowerment

EasyChair Preprint 5452

Abstract

Consumers mistrust of food brands, the health crisis we are facing nowadays, have deeply affected their assurance. This disastrous situation allows the consumer or the eater to find himself in front of a food universe in full mutation. As a result, his anxiety grows and he finds it more harder and harder to know what he is eating. And as Claude Fischler (1990, p.70) writes, "If we don't know what we eat, doesn't it become difficult to know not only what we are going to become, but also what we are ?". The purpose of this article is to clarify through a literature review a new consumer trend adopted by the consumer or the eater in the choice of his products. It is mainly the search for information on the products that should be consumed before any purchase decision. This behavior has evolved with the new information technologies where the consumer is surrounded by any kind of information he may needs. Technology comes to assist him, to lighten up him, to complete the missing information and to give him back the power or rather, his empowerment, in other words technology comes to transform him from a passive actor to an autonomous active actor, actor of his consumption and his food... He has become a "consum actor" (Badot and Cova, 1992). This power perceived by technology, would transform the way, consumers or eaters choose their food.

Keyphrases: Consumers, Empowerment, Technology, power

@booklet{EasyChair:5452,
  author    = {Ouafae Belharar and Abdellatif Chakor},
  title     = {Internet Technologies as a Tool for Consumer Empowerment},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 5452},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2021}}