Recommendation vs Product: Product features are rapidly becoming secondary to the recommendations supporting them. There’s an intrinsic lack of trust in the market and an absent product endorsement is suspicious, regardless of the product feature set. Contrived recommendations are even more suspect.

Resilience vs Price: Confronted with the other 3 R’s and the facility of product duplication, price elasticity will become a more important variable than price alone.

Relation vs Place: Optimal location/distribution of products and services will matter less over time than the context within which it is delivered – cross-selling, collaborative filtering, just-in-time provision.

Reputation vs Promotion: Reputation of the seller is becoming more important than promotion. All the promotion in the world will not be able to make up for a poor reputation.

While the 4 P’s are easy to control, the 4 R’s are beyond a seller’s direct control to a large degree. Optimal self-organization of the 4 R’s depends more on authenticity and involvement of the customer in product design and delivery.

It’s often been said that our technological progress far outstrips our morality. But perhaps our moral development has never been the problem – the awareness of it has.  We have never been as interconnected as we are today. You would think that the free flow of information would facilitate dialogue, mutual understanding, reconciliation, and compromise. Does it?

In the past five years, we’ve witnessed horrific wars in Gaza, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Kashmir, and countless civil wars such as Sri Lanka and Rwanda.

We’re all on the outside looking in, blogging and tweeting away, but are the principle participants connecting with each other? My guess is not. Would it make a difference? Has connecting online made an impact or contribution to peace recently?

If I didn’t get good service.. If I was unhappy in anyway.. I might decide to share that negative experience with a couple hundred thousand of my online “friends”. And then tens of thousands more of them might chime in with similar experiences. And that wouldn’t be good.

Of course, negative spin eventually blows over, but what would the financial impact of such an event be?

Having millions of connections is no longer far fetched. The power of twitter connections is a function of the senders reputation and the receivers receptibility. Many weak connections can create critical mass of opinion and influence decision making.

And so, if my cell phone, MID, or tablet broadcast my social media stats, would that change the buying experience at all?

“Social Media Analysis can have powerful implications for marketers. For instance, a clothing retailer could identify a spike in positive chat about a celebrity that is wearing one of their apparel items, and could immediately feature that piece of clothing on their homepage and launch campaigns to a targeted audience interested in that celebrity and lifestyle. This allows the retailer to immediately maximize the new revenue opportunity, and deliver more engaging, relevant content to its customer base.”

This is interesting. It could also be a useful method of obtaining realtime feedback on marketing campaigns, allowing you to determine which aspects are most likely to go viral or which interventions (updating the homepage, creating new offers) have the greatest impact.

It’s not exactly personalized, but it does have the potential to make an organization more adaptive to perceived changes in the market. I wonder if they’re listening to this post right now?

Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement of Autonomy or their products. I am not associated with Autonomy in any way. I have not tested this product or validated its claims.