Florian Zettelmeyer, the head of the Marketing Department at the Hass School of Business at UC Berkeley, convinced me to teach a new course in his department. I am excited about boiling down some of my thoughts from the last years and share what I have starting to see emerge only recently.

In this course, we explore the new profound possibilities for customer centric marketing in the Web 2.0 era. We move away from broad customer segmentation towards a market of one, the individual. This shift has been enabled by the unprecedented amounts of data that we can have on the individual, as well as the new communication platforms of interaction that we can use to reach out to them. On these platforms, individuals have also been empowered and incentivized to generate and disseminate data and content, in turn fueling the expectations that they be treated as the individuals that they are.

Up till the emergence of Web 2.0, key drivers for data collection was cost cutting, optimization of business processes, and better customer segmentation. Data collected was mainly company process and sales data, with data on an individual basis very thin. Even Google search is based off very little individual data, based matching the couple of bytes of the search terms the user provides with the couple of bytes the advertiser has provided as metadata to the ad.

In what we will term the new data revolution, we will focus on the data generated by the individual and disseminated to his peers, and explore its implications for new business models and services. The “up-channel” of data has become much broader than the googlesque trickling up of a search term. Whether explicitly or implicitly contributed, intentionally (blog posting) or unintentionally (facebook feeds), users are contributing a wide variety of data. These data types ranges from qualitative data, such as relationship and sentiment data, to quantitative data, such as transactional, intention, attention and location data. With these previously unavailable data, companies have much more power to use new technologies to create innovative services. Social recommendations and behavioral targeting are examples of recent usage of these forms of data.

Off the back of this data revolution and the empowerment of the individual, we also observe the rise of a new type of customer with strong expectations of personal relationships, accountability, and innovative individualized services. He expects truthful conversations instead of one way PR messages. He is also keenly aware of the value of the data he is providing to the company as an individual, and expects highly individualized services and features that are qualitatively different from before,

With these new customer expectations, companies need to dramatically adjust their marketing efforts. Visionary companies will fully embrace these new data and communication possibilities to engage and understand their customers, making each and every one a potential trusted partner, adding unprecedented value to both sides.