Why Computing Systems Matter to Serving the Empowered Consumer

The blogpost below was first published on 18 June 2012 on the IBM website at http://tiny.cc/e0p3fw.

Today’s consumer is empowered like never before.  The continued spread of mobile communications and the rapid rise of social media have become important parts of the buying process.  Consumers are relying more on their social networks than on retailers' messaging during the buying process.  Consider that a pair of recent surveys revealed that 90 percent of consumers trust the recommendations of their friends and family and 70 percent trust the recommendations of complete strangers, but less than 10 percent trust the recommendations of retailers.  This means that consumers have 7 times the amount of influence over other consumers than retailers do!

To read the full blog post, please visit http://tiny.cc/e0p3fw.