There's an interesting phenomenon going on in Marketing these days. The accessibility of the Internet and the creativity of consumers have created an environment where customers are in control of several brands, and the smart marketers are just "rolling with it".

General Motors, Sony, MasterCard, and Home Depot have all empowered consumers to create their own commercials for re-broadcasting. Sometimes with unflattering results.

But GMs willingness to host these commercials and not delete them (at least the ones in good taste) actually is a net gain in terms of creating a dialogue with consumers. Afterall, these consumers were already venting their frustrations outside the realm of GMs control. At least GM is given a chance to show they acknowledge consumer concerns, even if they aren't addressing them.

I think it does disarm an activist consumers position considerably if their opinion can be freely expressed as a comment in a companies blog or discussion forum. Again, it's better to be the first to know instead of hearing through the grapevine on a consumers blog that they had a bad customer service experience and would not recommend the service to anyone else.

Dan Weiden touched on this topic briefly during a keynote he delivered recently here in Oregon. As the Architect behind the Nike brand, he's had an interesting evolutionary perspective on this topic. His reaction was more facially expressed than articulated.... but I could tell it was creating quite a creative challenge in the larger B2C space.

The principles behind i-Dialogue ("Internet Dialogues") embrace this trend, but it's interesting to see the relatively slower adoption of online customer empowerment in the B2B market. True, the customers tend to be a bit more professional, but still.... wouldn't you rather provide 4-6 dialogue options through your own web site and resolve customer issues one-on-one instead of waiting for consumers to communicate with you via their own public blogs and other discussion forums?