In a fast follower industry like retail, when a process or technology moves from a nice-to-have to a-need-to-have, it’s an important event. The transitional moment is never clear. The happening varies by segment, it’s tempered by the hold on new initiatives during the holidays, and it’s inflated by the hype in the channel but it’s reasonable to speculate that we may be near that chasm crossing.

This show has plenty of experts covering the details of managing this transition so in the spirit of Blue Ocean thinking I want to ask: With reviews and other UGC being a future-given, how might this new content influence the boxes and arrows that map the way retailers and their stakeholders co-exist?

Terry Lundgren, during his morning keynote presentation gave us a data point when, during his comments regarding the use of customer reviews said: ”If you get bad reviews on a product, guess what? The product is bad! Get rid of it.” (thanks for capturing that clearly, Ellen)

As a former retailer at Federated and others, I understood where Terry was coming from, he was putting the customer first, and he was confirming his role as his customer’s agent. But this comment also struck me as an early whisper to a problem/opportunity that is the newest version of the creative tension that has a long history in the bloody and glorious history of vendor/retailer relationships. So how do we frame this phenomenon? And how will the consumers’ impact and opinion influence what we make and how we sell.  It is clear we are just at the beginning.

I believe it was George Gilder who once defined paradigm shifts as those moments when previous scarcities become abundances, which lead to the creation of new scarcities. I want to propose that our previous scarcities were the existence of product-level customer content and that our new scarcity is the lack of time, know-how, and structure to access and use all of this content in ways that are productive and efficient.  Makes me wonder if it’s time to dust off the work around past supply chain initiatives and rethink them in terms of the demand side.

To be sure, cross industry initiatives like this deserve more coverage – but for now, I wanted to capture the insight while it was fresh.  So far I asked four CIOs, three from retail and one from a clothing brand, from $ billion dollar plus firms – their responses were very positive to this deconstruction and the proposal to examine relationships and processes that may be effected by social media. What say you?

If you see me at tonight’s reception, flag me down and let’s start the Special Interest Group!