Today is Blog Action Day to fight Poverty and while I haven't done much to fight poverty lately other than donate to the Heifer Project, I do have markets and equality on my mind.
Yesterday I gave a presentation titled "This Little Piggy" done by Mzinga's talented Alexa Scordato:
At its most basic, the message of the presentation is "the market is moving online" but the more nuanced message is that markets are all about access to information. When access to information about a product - whether the product is stocks or candy - is unevenly distributed, someone has the opportunity to make more money than the product is objectively worth.
What I mean by that is if I as the consumer am offered a piece of candy for $1 at my corner store...and don't have any information about where else that candy is offered and at what price, I am unlikely to object paying that price. However, if I know that the store across the street is selling that piece of candy for 25 cents, I am unlikely to buy it for $1. Same goes for cars, stocks, software, groceries.
My point to the marketing crowd yesterday was that if you want to maintain high prices and margins on your products (and that is the reason marketing exists to begin with), marketers need to know more about their customers and the market than their customers know about them and their market. The internet has disrupted the balance of power between companies and their customers because it dramatically increases the distribution of information...and now customers often know more...and know they have choices where in the offline world they may not have. So...social media marketing is not just about keeping up with the tools and methods your customers are using, it is about keeping up with them in terms of what they know - all of which is captured in conversations.
Getting back to Blog Action Day... what does that online market dynamic do for the impoverished? First and foremost, the digital divide is an enormous issue - if one segment of our society has to operate from a position of information weakness, they are likely to pay more than they have to for all sorts of things...which seems ironic in the extreme. So getting online is important. Second, access to information is not alone enough - the ability to sort, filter, and find information from reliable sources is also critical which suggests education is a key component. Operating in an information economy without the skills to filter is a scary thing.
Do I have a solution. No, I'm afraid I don't but also I don't think the topic of information inequity and its various ramifications are talked about enough in the always connected, gadget friendly crowd I tend to hang out with online. What do you think? How can we help?
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