From Consumer Response to Active Consumer:

Measuring the Effectiveness of Interactive Media

David W. Stewart and Paul A. Pavlou (2002)

This article explains the essential differences between traditional media and interactive media, especially regarding advertising and consumer behavior. The authors begin by commenting that for several decades marketing theories had all been based on the paradigm of seeing marketing mainly as a one-way communication between the marketer (the corporations) and the consumers. In other words, in this paradigm the marketer is seen as the only sender of a message. The consumer just reacts to this message with a certain behavior. The interactive media changes this view of communication to a two-ways process where even the consumer send clear and well defined messages to the marketers. Communication, rather than persuasion, is the key concept in the consumer-marketer relationship under the rules of interactive media.

Internet has, without any doubt, represented the main medium that allows interactive communication between the corporations and the end consumers. With this new technology the user can not just select exactly the kind of offers they want to see and even to be able to determine when and how they want to see it, but the viewers can even send constant feedback to the marketers and producers about their wishes and preferences. The possibility of sharing has allowed not only a constant communication between producers and consumers, but consumers can even communicate with one another by sharing products reviews, check the current trends and even being able to form bigger groups in order to be able to negotiate with the companies in more favorable terms.

This expanded communication between all the different actors have had even further consequences in the marketplace. The Internet constitutes a concrete tool for offering products and services with "value added" that will imply a bigger chance for consumers to get higher quality products. However, the authors explain that it is not all that clear whether the Internet has created a real value for which consumers are actually willing to pay. Let's just think of a worldwide service as Facebook. Most people could hardly picture their lives without using this service, and yet it is quite likely that just a tiny little fraction of all that people would actually be willing to pay for using this service, assuming that Facebook was a payed service. Internet and the interactive media have imposed new rules in the marketplace and the companies must therefore rethink their business model in order to be able to detect where the real opportunities for profitability are.