Realising-consumer-rights

The social web has eroded those costs, meaning it’s now not only easy
for people to form groups, it’s also easy for the group to achieve critical
mass and to co-ordinate and synchronise its actions in order to achieve a
shared goal.
“Now that group-forming has gone from hard to ridiculously easy, we are
seeing an explosion of experiments with new groups and new kinds of
groups.” 48
What’s more, in the past effective group effort often depended on a
division of labour that assigned all members a task to undertake in pursuit
of the group’s aims. Not anymore.
An active intermediary can now work on behalf of the group and
harness the power of its numbers – rather than the efforts of its
members – to achieve the shared goal. Other than aligning with the
group and giving permission for an action to betaken on their behalf,
individual members can now be effective in aggregate, while remaining
largely passive in practice.
In a consumer context, this dynamic can reduce the costs of engaging
with a given market – offering consumers the attractive proposition of
better outcomes (because the group attains buying power) for less effort
(because the intermediary undertakes the heavy lifting).
If the common goal has popular appeal, the group can grow virally
as members use their amplified voice to spread the word across their
networks. In instances where the goal relates to a product or service that
that group wants, but the market doesn’t offer, it can signal the nature
and scale of its demand to the market – indicating to providers the
opportunity to make a return from responding to its needs. 49 Of course,
easy dissolution goes hand in hand with easy group formation, which can
lessen the impact of group action if companies or governments feel they
can ride out a media storm. Collaborative action is fluid in nature, which
comes with advantages for harnessing the energy of a crowd but may
make maintaining that momentum challenging.
As highlighted in the section on new intermediary services, this potential
is fuelling a proliferation of new kinds of group buy, including consumers
working together or through intermediaries to, for example, group switch
(where consumers change en masse to the utility providers who offers the
group the best deal), or to unlock access to wholesale markets.
48
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, 2008, p54
49
For an example see the Demand It! function of eventful.com
Realising consumer rights
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