The rise of ‘prosumers’ over the next five years will fundamentally change the way companies and marketers in particular operate. This is the one of the key messages from a new report by the Economist Intelligence Unit, entitled ‘The digital company 2013 How technology will empower the customer’. The report is based on the results of a survey of over 600 senior business executives worldwide and in-depth interviews with various independent technology experts, aimed at determining how technology will impact on businesses five years from now.
Its key finding is that the pace of transformation of business caused by technology is likely to accelerate in the next five years, with innovation having an enormous impression on organisations. This will impact on all levels of business, but the report suggests its most significant repercussions will be on the influence of customers, which will be dramatically enhanced as a consequence of new communications technologies; a trend that is starting to become evident with the recent surge in social media and Web 2.0.
The term ‘prosumer’ (combining ‘professional’ and ‘consumer’) refers to the blurring of boundaries and increasing interaction between organisations and their customers as well as suppliers, employees and partners.
The consequence of this trend, predicts the report, is that customers will have supplanted in-house R&D as the primary source of innovative ideas by 2013. Robin Bew, editorial director of the Economist Intelligence Unit, comments, firms will need to prepare their entire organisations to manage a much more responsive, customer-focused business.
Whilst some of the report’s predictions are years off, Dwain Thomas, MD at Concep Evolution, a sponsor of the report, believes others are already starting to become a reality. He points to fellow sponsor WebEx, a company that is already responding to specific client demands. WebEx has been encouraged to bring forward things that it wasn’t looking to develop for another two or three years, says Thomas, adding that some of Concep’s own clients have also started behaving in this way. We’ve been asked by clients for better dashboards because they need a better view of their clients. This is helping us in the long run. This trend has started now, but by 2013 it will be far more prevalent.
The implications for organisations as a whole is that they need to embrace technology to facilitate this kind of interaction, says Thomas. For the marketer, meanwhile, the onus will be on being more responsive. Customers are now more in control they have more information at their fingertips. They can use things like blogs to force companies to respond to demands they can really raise a stink. Again, this is already happening, but whilst today it is the exception, Thomas says by 2013 it will become the norm, and therefore potentially more damaging.
Marketers must be vigilant and aware of what is being said about their organisations online and in a social networking context. This will require a combination of old-fashioned PR and modern social media, explains Thomas. Google alerts on your company name, for example, are useful tools for damage limitation.
He also advocates bringing the wider organisation into play to ensure any relevant commentary is responded to. Marketers need to lever the entire organisation to be their eyes and ears.
The challenge, Thomas admits, will be in working out how this process is managed, bearing in mind most marketing functions are already over-stretched. It may be that a fundamental refocusing, reappraisal and even reinvention of the marketing and PR function may be required to allow organisations to successfully respond to and meet the needs of the prosumer of 2013. This process is unlikely to be easy or popular for many marketers.
