Give Brands nothing, but take from them EVERY THING!

Battle: The Great War of Digital Consumerism
Strategy: Use Digital to connect, engage, and destroy brands, one interaction at a time!
Weaponry: Digital media or media enabled by the converging forces of social, mobile, cloud and internet of things
Incumbent: Brand
Challenger: Consumer

Who will win this war - consumers or brands?

Consumers push Brands forward...
If today brands are feeling that customers change loyalties at the flip of a coin, they have absolutely no idea about the Great War that is only beginning to take shape. This War will be started by the Digital Consumer and will inspire the entire consumer base to rise and win the war of consumerism if brands don't act now!

The Digital Epicenter: Convergence of Forces to drive Innovation

Three years after I wrote the article on the new facets of Innovation, we are seeing forces come together to redefine how business will be conducted by keeping the consumer in the center of all decisions. 

Multimedia, social media, and the Internet of Things is fueling exponential growth in data for the foreseeable future. To enable the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity, companies will need to fish where the fish is (on social networks), allow consumers to access information in anywhere, anytime (via mobile devices), and derive customer intelligence from big data. This can only be possible using scalable yet cost-effective cloud infrastructure. 

The digital epicenter, as show in the figure above, is the point of convergence of digital forces - social (behavior), mobile (access), cloud (delivery), big data (context)*. This is the target state that companies should aim for, where true customer-centricity can be realized.