consumer control

Who has the responsibility?

Voltaire said it first: With great power comes great responsibility. Others prefer a more-recent attribution, citing Peter Parker's Uncle Ben in Spiderman.

So, as the ad industry continues to talk about how the consumer is in control, they also spend a great deal of time trying to figure how to take away that control from them. How's this for a quote:

Earlier today, Giuseppe Pacheco Tweeted "You No Longer Control Your Company’s Brand" with a link to You No Longer Control Your Company's Brand | Spin Sucks. BTW, I responded to Giuseppe right away with a link to one of my earlier posts about this topic and I follow him, so I usually like his links.

I was reminded of this issue by C.B. Whittemore's post on our recent retail walkabout at Levi's Customer Retail Experience. During our visit to the Levi's store, C.B. asked about taking a picture of their new Curves display and we were told that we couldn't take photos in the store.

Much has been said about the legislative process that yielded America's health bill this week, and most of the conversation has been about the opinions, expectations, and fears voiced in, well, the conversation. We've just had our first behind-the-scenes glimpse into how the government makes sausage, and we didn't like it one bit. Watching also impeded it getting made, or at least getting it made well.

I confess that I have a warm spot in my heart for customer service operations. It is probably because I met my wife of 29.5 years Eileen Marie when she and I were on the customer service phones at the Polaroid Corporation. As an old phone jockey, it is apparent to me that the world of customer service is transforming.

This week Doc Searls posted on an idea called “Personal RFP.” In this model, people wishing to buy a product would be able to put together an open “request for proposal” – essentially, a specification for what they want to buy, including budget, and solicit bids from suppliers wanting to sell it to them. [Nothing even approximately like this exists today, except perhaps Priceline, the reverse-auction travel broker, which is full of compromises to the Personal RFP model.]

Cynthia Kurtz starts off a recent blog post with a provocative statement: “Telling a story is not always the best way to tell a story.”

She continues: