Do you remember who was the TIME magazine the 2006 Person of the Year? In case you don’t, it was you, me and all the people of the world who had access to the Net: armed with the Internet and the social media the customer seemed to have been able to change the market power game and be for the first in modern history on the market steering wheel (See link). Marketers baffled by the decreasing effectiveness of the traditional marketing communication and the time-honored persuasion tactics had no other choice but accept the fact that their full and undisputed control on the media and message was a thing of the past.
Praised as one of the major upshots of technology democratization, social networking, citizen journalism, and customer engagement, the customer empowerment became a major nightmare of the marketers forced to open their business to customer scrutiny and expose them to social media publicity disasters. The Customer Empowerment as a game changer was something I consistently would mention to my students at the very start of my Digital Marketing courses the last years: the smart, tech-savvy and networked customer was not anymore the weak link in the Marketing Equation.
Is the Customer Empowerment still the case? I am not sure at all and certainly, I have to think twice before I say this to my students again. The very technology that empowered the consumer during the last decade seems to work some time now again to the marketer's advantage. In fact, I have some bad news for the empowered consumer: Marketers armed with AI, immense computer power and zillions of bytes of customer data are quickly gaining the market upper hand. Customer profiling based on data trails consumers create online gives marketers new tools to create detailed customer profiles and predict as well as influence their behavior in ways we need to look at and discuss in more detail.
In the Market Power / Technology grid I attempt to describe how I look to this issue. The years in the timeline represent some in my view milestones of the marketing power journey.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16242528/ns/us_news-life/t/time-magazines-person-year-you/#.W_rn5WhKiM8
