consumer empowerment

Dear CMO,

Last weekend was Valentine. Together with many others, my wife and I celebrated the love that has come to define the 25 years that we’ve been together. But as we did, I also started thinking about that “other” relationship you tell me I should have. The relationship with your company. Your brand.

My networked, always-on life just hit a wall, and it has given me a chance to consider how quickly and completely digital experience can go from feelings of empowerment to feeling utterly abandoned.

by: John Winsor

I've been excited lately to see that the idea of crowdsourcing has caused such a stir. You know a paradigm is about to shift when lines start getting drawn in the sand. When I was writing about co-creation in Beyond the Brand back in 2003 I couldn’t even imagine how the open source movement would radically change so many businesses.

by: Jonathan Salem Baskin

by: Scott Goodson

I have had several people ask me to re-post the StrawberryFrog white paper our strategic group wrote earlier this year on social media. Since then we have created several other campaigns including the Agent Provocateur luxury fashion brand/online retailer social media campaign and the work for Scion a division of Toyota. So we have garnished some important learnings.

by: David Armano

Today as I watched a video of Peter Arnell describe the rationale behind Tropicana's rejected package design, I had a bit of an epiphany. Many companies, brands and organizations are inadvertently building walls between themselves and their customers. It's unintentional, happened over time—but ultimately in this age of empowerment, customers feel more connected to each other than they do to your business or brand.

by: Karl Long

In this fascinating interview on Charlie Rose, Lawrence Lessig provides some interesting comments about “hybrid economies” where companies co-create value with their customers. As he says some companies, mostly new and small, are already adopting this hybrid economic model, but bigger companies in the future will be transformed by this.

by: Jonathan Salem Baskin

(This essay was co-written by Michael Cayley, who recently released the ebook Introducing Social Capital Value Add: Value Based Management for the Networked Age. He blogs here and here...and here, I hope, when the mood strikes him).

by: George Silverman