Feedback is intended for businesses and owners, reviews are intended for other consumers.
It's mostly about Consumers communicating to producers about their product offerings, though it is possible to implement feedback for about anything. Consumers who are in hurry or don't have an suitable input device (such as a Bluetooth keyboard provided by the store) can use prewritten feedback messages that usually take the form of:
- "I am discouraging others from buying your product because..."
- "I didn't buy your product because..."
- "I am hesitating buying your product because..."
- "I bought your product because..."
- "I will encourage others to buy your product because..."
Feedback can be used to enhance life-enhancing cycles and stop life-destroying ones.
Ecological concepts of leverage usually rely on some notion of feedback. Sister projects to Consumerium, e.g. Wikipedia, have used these concepts directly as leverage in governance, e.g. defining limits of etiquette, vandalism, edit wars, to prevent a 'race to the bottom' in destructive tactics. And, more happily, encouraging notions of ethics, community, governance and even useful groupthink (factions or parties simplifying discourse on governance questions) to enhance the life of all those touched by Wikipedia.
Likewise, many parties in Consumerium, including those "targetted" by it, can benefit because:
- It signals companies that profit opportunities are available if they meet the new higher standards of moral purchasing of their market
- It gives companies the chance to accelerate their product development pace to outrace the competition to meet these new higher standards
- It gives consumers the an uniform interface to contact all companies
- Feedback can be anonymous or ID'd with an email address if reply is desired - thus limiting targetting of consumers by companies
- The feedback can be distributed to the whole supply chain.
- The feedback can be gathered for use in the political system, to signal the desire of many citizens in the body politic to require some change, e.g. better ingredients marking and mandatory labels.
Powerful as feedback is, it can be over-ruled by the higher-level control of information flows, e.g. who controls the forms used for feedback, rules of the system (incentives, punishment, constraints), self-organization, goals of the system which can rule out whole areas of investigation or dialogue, the mindset out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise, e.g. some will object to anyone making a profit from Consumerium, and the power to transcend paradigms, overthrow an elite, change a structure.
Usually many decision on these levels must be made before feedback can be fully understood and used to apply any real leverage on the parties in any system.