Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Beneficial or not? (for markets or for consumers)

It is interesting to see the recommendations of Amazon.com and other filter mechanism as a pre-selected personal taste for the consumers. Does that mean that we lost our control on making decision to select? I would see that personal using patterns whether they are heavy users or light users on the specific media as a precondition for the recommendation lists in digital entertainment economy to exert influence on the consumers. Probably, it could be the other direction which is the information related to consumers’ interests effectively provided by the services that makes consumers become heavy users. When consumers heavily rely on that media, they will not only pay attention to what content or product the media select for them, but they will also practically have purchase intention and behavior. Otherwise, they will choose to believe another way of word-of-mouth.


Indeed, digital market provides greater supply consumers than the offline market. I like the saying in the article that “many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching – a market response to inefficient distribution.” By expanding the shelf space and guiding the consumers to find out the product they like, hopefully the online news providers can have some idea from this. However, if following this kind of pre-selected mechanism, will it become another gatekeeper?

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