Customer's New Voice: Extreme Relevancy and Experience through Volunteered Customer Information

CHAPTER 2 Power and Transparency

Complete open access to information creates new transparency. This new transparency creates absolute power. It is this access to information that has given birth to a new customer and the relative evolution of absolute customer power.

The commercial world has witnessed an inversion of the consumer/business power structure. Since the early 1900s when Henry Ford pronounced that “any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black,” customers have been subordinate to business. Today, the polar opposite is true: Consumers choose not only the color but every dimension of the who, what, where, when, and how of a product or service. If the consumer/business power structure is deconstructed, the core of the power transformation is the evolution of information. Technology has fundamentally changed the information equation. Technology enables information. Information enables power. The enabling technological chain that underpins the rapidly evolving direct consumer consists of four parts:

1. Technology—Internet/mobile infrastructure
2. Information—resulting by-product and the raison d’être of technology
3. Competency—and consumer’s ability and willingness to use it
4. Culture—emerging new consumer behavioral norms

Absolute Power

The absolute power of today’s consumer is unquestioned. The attributes of consumer power have radically evolved from a subservient, simple, mute, naive, defenseless entity to an assertive, vocal, influential, ...