How can experts effectively manage empowered lay clients?

How should experts respond when online markets give clients a megaphone? Ignoring feedback can backfire in disintermediated, review-driven markets; over-accommodating can hollow out expertise. Studying 67 porcelain artists in Jingdezhen, China, after market reforms, we identify a third path: decompose the work and distinguish what is core to expertise from what is peripheral. By letting clients influence peripheral elements (e.g., size) while retaining control over core techniques and signature styles, artists preserved autonomy and satisfied lay demand. Those who treated their work as an indivisible whole either capitulated—producing client-dictated “crafts” decoupled from identity—or exited the market; both paths eroded autonomy and career prospects.

Selective accommodation turns lay feedback into translation rather than surrender: “peripheralizing client control” (channel requests toward safe-to-change features) and “centralizing expert control” (guard nonnegotiables that define the artistic essence). Counterintuitively, granting limited, carefully channeled client influence can strengthen professional autonomy by building acceptance and sales without sacrificing the expert’s core.

Management insight: In client-facing expert work, don’t ask “Should we accept or reject feedback?” Ask “Where can we accept it?” Make the core/periphery line explicit, codify negotiables (what can vary) and nonnegotiables (what must embody your signature expertise), and train teams to translate client requests into peripheral changes. This preserves autonomy, reduces reputational risk in public review markets, and sustains demand without identity corruption.