Is customer empowerment an effective strategy? Yes. I would integrate into my own company. I believe customer empowerment is definitely something important in todays society. Although important, it also has to have boundaries. Having your customers give their opinions and wants on items for your company is a great idea. It can help lead you in a direction that will thrive and allow your sales to reach its full potential. But I would only go that far with customer empowerment. When you give the customers complete empowerment, sometimes that can lead to misdirection, poor business decisions, and absolute failure to keep the company financially stable. Obviously customers want deals and the hot new thing on your market but what they sometimes might not understand is where the company is in development, financial stability, and all around capabilities to produce such products. Although if you go with this strategy the right way, it is never a bad thing to show appreciation to your customers and give them a feeling of being heard. A lot of companies do bad job at allowing their customers to give their opinions and thoughts about what they are selling. This loses customers interest and a lot of the time the company does not produce what the customers want. Once again this all falls on a happy medium. A little customer empowerment and company accountability would go a long way in having success. Just never do something that fully gives someone the power over your company and run it like a dictatorship. 

2.)

When we are building up loyalty and community for the company trust is definitely the most important factor among all the factors. Especially in the Internet era, for the most of the time there is no opportunity to even meet with customers, and we can only build trust between the two sides through cell phones and the Internet, which is not easy. I believe the first important thing is show your sincerity.This refers to whether the company show concern for their customer's interests. The customer is such that if you care about his interests , he thinks the company has a good intentions. This can be useful when you are a starting company. but when you fully invested in the field it is time to invest in our product. As a company the core is definitely the most important factor to build up trust. As long as you have strong product, customer feedback can be your we pean to build up the trust with your customer community. And when you have a great product it is time to promote it. Customers are the people who have used the product directly, and their comments are the most informative and credible, so show the customer reviews to potential customer is incredibly important. I do not believe consumers should trust a company. You can have good opinion toward some company but always remember company want their profit. As customer we should always put our interest first so always compare between products before you make the decision.