Quite a mouthful huh? The presentation used company examples to trace the evolution of customer participation along two business processes: purchase decision and product development.
I'll admit, it's quite broad and a bit of a "duh" type of subject that has been written about again and again over the past years, with the basic point being that the boundaries between customers and companies are disappearing (or rather, should be disappearing if companies know what's good for them). BusinessWeek wrote about this subject today as well, stressing that passionate customers can be "in effect, extensions of the company's sales, marketing, and product development teams" (story here)
While everyone gets the gist of this subject, what's interesting is looking at the evolution and seeing just how it is that customer impact is increasing. For example, looking at the purchase decision process, customers are getting involved much earlier and influencing a larger audience. When it was just Amazon reviews, existing customers influenced potential customers later in the purchase decision process, after a product had already been identified, by answering a question like "What is this book about." Then came blogs which start influencing potential customers earlier in the process when they're still in the midst of gatherhing information, answering questions like “What are some good books out there.” Now we have a number of social shopping networks like This Next (it's shopcast badge is in the upper left hand corner of this blog) and Style Hive. These sites really jumpstart the purchase decision process by building initial awareness, answering questions like "What should I buy? What's the next hot thing?"
As customers start getting in earlier and earlier in the process, they're really starting to influence more and more potential customers. Specifically, there are more people who want to know what are SOME GOOD BOOKS than people who want to know specifically about THIS BOOK. Likewise, there are more people who want to know what's the NEXT HOT THING than just what are SOME GOOD BOOKS.
It'll be interesting to see what the next step is in this evolution. Is there even another step? Perhaps it's to create demand by legitimizing customers as an official part of your sales force. For example, the BusinessWeek article mentioned Karmaloop which has a street team of customers that can spread the word and earn commission on each sale (think pyramid scheme - which I have tried for makeitmade! though no takers). Or will the next step be going so far back in the process that we find ourselves in the product development process where customers are helping to create real demand by figuring out what customers really want?
