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Commentary: The Twilight of Brand and Consumerism? Digital Trust, Cultural Meaning, and the Quest for Connection in the Sharing Economy

The economic and societal changes collectively labeled the “sharing economy” represent new digitally enabled ways of organizing economic activity that will reshape the world economy over the twenty-first century, blurring established lines between personal and commercial assets, consumers and producers, markets and hierarchies, and casual labor and full-time work. As platforms supersede firms as the preeminent institutions of society, they will challenge accepted business thinking that assumes an economy comprised primarily of large hierarchical organizations. This trajectory of change has spawned important new research in economics, management, and operations, largely centered on marketplace design, yield management, choosing an appropriate organizational scope, and creating effective labor policy. The contribution by Eckhardt et al. (2019) is a comprehensive and timely call to action for the marketing discipline, outlining an excellent and diverse range of open questions raised by the growth of the sharing economy, spanning those that affect marketing institutions, marketing processes, and models of creating stakeholder value. Building on Eckhardt et al. (2019), I highlight three research directions that I believe will contribute the greatest value to marketing in our digital future: (1) understanding how the relationship between consumer value and cultural meaning is altered by the blurring of lines between the personal and the commercial, (2) understanding how social motives and the desire for human connection meld with commercial objectives to cocreate consumer value in sharing-economy experiences and alter the calculus of consumer choice, and (3) understanding the evolving interplay between decentralized digital cues and centralized corporate brands in generating consumer trust at scale.