inKNOWvations: May 2010

The Rising Influence of Brand Advocates

Pat Conroy and Anupam Narula

Consumer product companies are witnessing the early days of a profound transformation in interacting with consumers. A number of concurrent technology and social trends are changing the way consumer product companies connect with consumers, and more importantly how consumers interact with each other in influencing buying decisions.

The emerging world, long a source of cheap labor, now rivals the rich countries for business innovation.

In 1980 American car executives were so shaken to find that Japan had replaced the United States as the world’s leading carmaker that they began to visit Japan to find out what was going on. How could the Japanese beat the Americans on both price and reliability? And how did they manage to produce new models so quickly? The visitors discovered that the answer was not industrial policy or state subsidies, as they had expected, but business innovation. The Japanese had invented a new system of making things that was quickly dubbed “lean manufacturing.”

It can be tempting to dismiss talk of sustainability in business as greenwash. But after spending a few days moving among the green-business elite, I feel like people are proving that concern for the planet is a source of innovation every day.