Forrester: the Age of the Consumer

From Forrester's Competitive Strategy In The Age Of The Customer Report [.pdf]:

We’re about to enter a new era that Forrester calls the age of the customer. [...] One by one, every corporate investment has been commoditized. Now every company can tap into global factories and global supply chains. After huge IT investments, companies are realizing that the Internet cloud provides all of the computing resources they need. Brand, manufacturing, distribution, and IT are all table stakes. The only source of competitive advantage is the one that can survive technology fueled disruption — an obsession with understanding, delighting, connecting with, and serving customers. In this age, companies that thrive, like Best Buy, IBM, and Amazon, are those that tilt their budgets toward customer knowledge and relationships.

Here's how technology fuels customer disruption in a number of industries:

The solution?
Marketers will have to learn the difference between customer-possessed and customer obsessed.

The simplest way to become customer-obsessed is to give the customer exactly what she wants — but as Henry Ford noted, that would have meant giving people “a faster horse.” Instead, companies will need to combine their own insights with the latent desires of customers. Look for a growth in the kind of communities that companies like hotelier IHG and Godiva Chocolatier are building, where loyal customers collaborate with corporate innovators to design the next generation of products.