Redefining customer value: Corporate strategies for the social web

Here's an Economist Intelligence Unit report on how the rise of the "social web" is forcing a rethink on how customer value should be defined and analyzed. Sponsored by the software company SAS, the report touches on some core strategic issues:

Firms that monitor and act upon these insights see a unique opportunity to improve market performance accordingly. This may mean changing the way products are developed and brought to market. It could mean the creation of new cross-departmental efforts to ensure that critical customer insights are properly disseminated. In any case, these new information channels demand that executives look at the definition of a valuable customer in a very different way.

For most companies, these efforts are nascent. On the one hand, survey results and executive interviews reveal that social media and other new communication channels have led executives to admit that a new definition of customer value is necessary. On the other, few companies have figured out how to rewrite that definition properly, or how to build a strategy that takes those insights into account in a formal way.