Customer's New Voice: Extreme Relevancy and Experience through Volunteered Customer Information

Foreword

In every apple you'll find five seeds. Plant those and the result will be five different trees, bearing five different fruits, as unlike each other as they are of their parent. This is because apple seeds are heterozygous, meaning they produce different individuals in a variety that trends toward the infinite. All the familiar varieties of apples—McIntosh, Delicious, Granny Smith, Fuji—come from trees grown from twigs of parents grafted onto saplings that are nothing more than rooted trunks.

The normalizing of apple varieties through grafting is one of civilization's oldest industrial practices, and serves as a model for the way industry today normalizes another heterozygous species: Homo sapiens. To any company doing mass marketing, you are not a distinct and different human being. You are a rootstock for a graft that produces cash. The graft is a template: a controlled and generic set of appetites the company wishes to fill. In some cases the company seeks customers like you, which they understand in terms of demographics, regions, sectors, income levels, tested preferences, and so on. In some cases the company creates appetites through advertising, promotion, and other marketing methods. But in all cases the need for scale outweighs the need to respect customers' differences as human beings.

For evidence of how one-sided this is, go to a bookstore or a library and visit the business section. See if you can find a book about what individual customers bring to the ...