Products as tools afford consumers modified relationships with the physical environment. They also afford consumers modified relationships with the social environment. The tools consumers choose for modifying the physical environment communicate something about consumers. Cultural and social norms dictate preferred methods and tools for modifying the physical environment. Use of those methods affords consumers membership in a culture or society. Use of specific products or brands from a class affords members the ability to reveal their roles within a culture or society. Within a consumer culture, products and brands afford observers the ability to infer the cultural roles and social locations of others. Changes in consumption patterns imply changes in roles and locations. Changes in roles and location entail changes in consumption patterns in a dynamic process of identification and distinction.
Brands increasingly signify relationships, not products. Many marketers and researchers still view brands exclusively as signifying product differences even though, through competition, most product categories have reached parity. Differences often do not exist. Differences that do exist usually do not change the affordances of competing products. Many other marketers recognize that brands stand for relationships, but assert that the relationship is between consumers and products. However, the relationship between the consumer and the product is the affordance, which is the ability to modify a relationship with the environment. Therefore, brands signify relationships with the environment, either physical or social. Because brands cannot modify the physical environment except by appearance, their affordance is to modify relationships with the social environment. Brands signify relationships with the social environment.
Successful consumer e-marketing must exhibit its own affordances. E-marketing must afford consumers the opportunity to reduce uncertainty about product and brand affordances. Fundamentally, e-marketing must afford e-consumption, the continual statement, reinforcement and modification of relationships in the consumer culture. Therefore, the design of e-marketing must include elements necessary for a sense of social presence. As discussed previously, combinations of elements are meaningful, whereas individual elements may be meaningless. The combinations will include appearances and behaviors that consumers interpret as signifying an afforded relationship. The design of e-marketing must adopt culturally defined combinations that signify culturally defined relationships.
As Pennington (2001) described, consumers can be the architects of their own virtual environments. Although the study addressed only physical environments, such environments without social environments usually lack vividness. Through computer-assisted design, consumers can build their own social environments. However, data collected from consumer choices affords marketers the opportunity to anticipate further choices in order to provide a more vivid and interactive consumer experience. Yahoo Inc. already uses the basic approach in Yahoo Personals (Saranow 2003), which is similar to the approach Amazon.com uses to recommend products based on previous choices. Yahoo Personals recommends a social choice based on a previous social choice. When developed further, later choices will reflect prior choices, a virtual social environment in which each choice of a virtual person brings a circle of virtual friends. This will afford interactivity with an entire social environment, not just with individual people generated by or filtered through technology.