In part three of a three part series on Social Regulation, Edelman Melbourne General Manager Grant Smith explores how businesses can harness the growing consumer power base.

A lot of people have opinions about the internet, many of which make me angry on a daily basis, but the danger of opinions in their own right is they only serve to amplify an individual’s already-held bias in an argument.

For example:

“The internet is a place for people to put up photos of their cats doing funny things” – Matt Muir

“The web is ruled by maniacs” – Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed

Clearly, what I did there demonstrates a modicum of selection bias, however I do need to highlight that this actually exists:

Internet for all

There’s a strong argument for internet expansion and access for all, on the grounds (among other things) that it promotes the spread of freedom of choice, democratisation of information, and increasingly diverse marketing opportunities for business. However we need to remember that at its heart, the internet is a technical solution to sharing information in a way that overcomes the tyranny of distance and the limitations of personal and professional networks.

Why’s this important? Because the early adopters of the Internet, when it still had a capital “I”, were not you and me. They weren’t farmers, or economists, or marketers, or consumers. They were scientists. Academics. Technophiles. Closely followed by pornographers, who arguably did the marketing world a favour by demonstrating the value of the internet as a vehicle for displaying, and ultimately monetising, the thing now called “content” by marketers across the world.

Early adopters

Early adopters of any new technology have different reasons for opting in than do the laggards and luddites, and this is where more of our big thinkers need to invest some think time – understanding the motivations and limitations of the seething mass of consumerism that falls outside of the 16 percent of the population on the other side of The Chasm. Those same 16 percenters who ultimately decide whether or not a fad becomes a trend.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, there are two million Australians who want an interest rate reduction, and another two million who’d quite happily like a rate hike. Maybe a tenth as many would be quite happy if banks stopped making margin calls, and I don’t know anyone who wants to pay more for a speeding fine. Yet these are things that are designed to shape consumer behavior. They are market signals that put economic pressure on us to do something that communication alone was never able to achieve.

You can give a man a fish and feed him for a day.

You can teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime.

You can tell a man that you’ll buy his fish and he’ll learn a damn sight faster how to catch more fish, bigger fish, more often, than he was ever going to otherwise.

Harnessing the consumer power base

The challenge then is working out how this growing consumer power base can be understood, accepted and adapted to, when there’s no rule book written on it. There are a lot of books full of opinions and case studies, but there aren’t any rules – not in the sense of formal regulators, such as the ACCC, which I mentioned in an earlier post in this series.

Within any large corporation, definitions and rules are critical to common understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing the business. Without definitions and rules to articulate the playing field of the new world order, lawyers, communicators, marketers, salespeople, production managers and even the traditional regulators are all playing a different game. We always have, but now it’s far more problematic when the customers outside the gates are playing a different one yet again.

At least part of the solution needs to be that businesses take a far more hands-on role in shaping the social environment from within it. By demonstrating personality, compassion and leadership in just a few of the channels populated by their customers, businesses can start to define what is and isn’t up for negotiation.

Learning curve

That’s not to say business will rule the digital airwaves – far from it. Indeed, businesses that do dip a toe in are probably going to be slapped for daring to interfere, slapped again for doing it wrong, slapped again for not embracing it whole-hog like the wonks who have been living there for the past five years, and slapped again because they misjudge, at some point, whether or not a specific hashtag campaign is a good idea.

Little of the above is fun for the business, and none of it’s fair. It probably also costs more than you think. So let’s not pretend otherwise – let’s call a spade a spade. The market is changing. The market is becoming self-aware, in a way that was previously unimaginable. And it will continue to become increasingly sentient, increasingly self-interested, and increasingly self-important. And as the market grows, its ability to regulate business behavior on the basis of socialised consumer expectation will grow with it.

You might also like to read Grant Smith's earlier pieces on Social Regulation: Social regulation: the outcome of consumer activism? and Social Regulation and the Model T Ford.