Social Media has revolutionized communication and has created transparency where it has otherwise either never existed or been protected. It has collapsed traditional boundaries that have deliberately been created between institutions, markets, buyers, and sellers to the point where it is now ordinary to engage in discourse with virtually anyone, anytime, and anywhere – a media revolution that the likes of Marshall McLuhan predicted with his famous expression: “the medium is the message” and “global village.” Truly a connected marketplace that is unprecedented in its reach and power to shape the world that we interact with daily. We now see both the supply and demand side connected in an exchange that has yielded countless technology innovations that helps better serve markets by aligning businesses to consumers through predictive analytics, just in time transactions, and fundamentally more intelligence to make informed decisions. Consumers and businesses have never been closer to the point where we now have leading technology companies on the forefront of this revolution claiming the “Customer Company” where customers sit at the very core of shaping products and services which help determine success, shared value / risk, and a fundamentally new ways of doing business. Gone are the days of successful companies driving less than expected products into a market and hide behind poor services, challenging cultures, and misaligned value statements – these factors and more can now be exposed and readily tested as advertised.
All of this is well and good but we are clearly still transforming and on a journey. There are still legacy paradigms and dynamics in play that suggest we have a ways to go. As an example, companies still take a leading position relative to their products and how they go to market, position to consumers, distribution, etc. Companies such as Google (as an example) use an impressive array of analytics to prescribe or at the very least guess what it is that you may want or find interesting enough to buy. This quantified intelligence is hugely powerful by providing probable options that a consumer is more likely to end up selecting then using classic segmentation as a prior and known technique. The problem, however, with all of these models is that they all rely on second-guessing the consumer whether through profiling or behavioral targeting and personalization its still fundamentally a guess, albeit an educated guess. And all along the consumer as stated before is becoming more and more educated. Educated to the point where they can almost reverse engineer an entire supply chain or distribution model to determine true cost and available margin to negotiate a better overall price. 3-D printing and home manufacturing will further revolutionize this space and determine value pricing to the consumer by further empowerment. All of this is coming and the time is now for social buying to take stage and make its mark by providing a platform to empower consumers to drive markets and decisions rather than inherit those that are defined by company boards and manufacturers. Social buying promises to align the educated consumer to value (products and services) in a way that balances scales that are otherwise not quite in equilibrium. Innovation has already started in this space and more is to come – stay tuned and watch this space.
work-in-progress 