These questions outline some of the current thinking of the BCCF. We provide some answers, but no definitive answers. If there is anything we say below that you do not understand, disagree with, or want to ask a question about, please email us. We will include these extra questions, answers and debate in the next layer of discussion. Thank you.

The questions

1. Why do we need a new form of commerce?

2. What is buyer-centric commerce?

3. What are the value gaps left by traditional business? And how do buyer centric businesses fill them?

4. What are the main forms of buyer-centric commerce?

5. How will buyer centric business initiatives earn their keep?

6. Why haven’t existing seller centric firms addressed this challenge of ‘value in my life’?

7. But surely, it’s the purpose of marketing to solve all these problems? Isn’t marketing all about focusing on customers and identifying and meeting their needs?

8. How big is the buyer-centric business opportunity?

9. Why is all this happening now?

10. So how can existing companies migrate to buyer-centric commerce?

11. But haven’t you just argued that inherent obstacles mean that existing businesses can never rise to the challenge of buyer-centric commerce?

12. Why should today’s sellers bother with buyer-centricity?

13. Should every business seek to become buyer-centric?

14. So what do I do on Monday morning?

15. A new learning agenda

1) Why do we need a new form of commerce?
 

In a competitive market, competition forces firms to keep extending the scope of, and raising the level of, the value they offer customers. If you fail to satisfy customers by understanding and meeting their needs, you don’t win their business. In which case, you go out of business.

So why do we need a new and different form of commerce? Because the dynamic duo of modern wealth creation – market forces plus the process of customer focus (anticipating, identifying and responding to customers’ changing needs) – have intrinsic limits. They cannot address all our wealth creation challenges.

We explain these intrinsic limits below. But what they mean is simple: the value modern companies can offer is bounded by unavoidable value blind spots or ‘value gaps’. Buyer centric commerce addresses these value gaps.

2) So what is buyer-centric commerce?

Traditional – i.e. ‘seller centric’ commerce – revolves around individual companies’ search for profitable customers. Its starting point and centre of gravity is a product (or service) and the productive assets that lie behind that product. It is driven in everything it does by the need to close sales of that product.

Buyer centric commerce revolves around individuals’ search for value: it's job is to improve the economics of the individual. It starts with the individual and works ‘outwards’ from that individual’s goals and needs to potential suppliers.

The term 'buyer-centric' was invented to create a contrast with today's predominantly seller-oriented status quo, but the principles - of a service designed to help individuals reach their personal goals and to improve their personal economics - applies across the board. So it could be 'person-centric', citizen-centric, employee-centric as well as buyer-centric, depending on the current role of the individual concerned.

The seller’s prime concern is how best to create and realise the value generated by his assets, infrastructure and operations. The individual’s prime concern is how to create and realise the value - ‘value in my life’ - he or she can generate from his or her own personal assets: investments of physical energy and labour, emotions, time, information, money, attention, and so on. Seller- and buyer-centric businesses therefore naturally pursue very different goals, using different types of infrastructure, skill sets, mindsets, relationships, revenue streams, cost structures and so on.

3) What are the value gaps left by traditional business? And how do buyer centric businesses fill them?

Value gaps are dimensions of value that traditional businesses either cannot, or do not want to, address. They are the product of deep structural, operational or intrinsic motivational forces that drive modern corporations to neglect certain ‘consumer’ needs. The value gaps can only be filled when these structural, operational and motivational issues are addressed. They cannot simply be addressed by a mere ‘change of heart’ by existing firms: by an executive decision to ‘be more customer-centric’, for example.

The value gaps come in many different forms. Here are some of the main examples.
 

buyer centric information No seller ever addresses buyers’ need for comprehensive, impartial, comparative information designed to help them make the best choice for their circumstances. It’s not in the interests of sellers to do so. The content of each individual seller’s marketing message is necessarily biased: intended to persuade the buyer of the superiority of his particular offer. Only a buyer-centric business – free of the vested interests involved in selling a particular product – can credibly address this need.

negative system effects Many of the things that individual sellers do when going to market make good sense when looked at from the point of view of that individual seller. But when many such individually rational actions are added together, the net effect for the buyer is often non-sense. It’s in the interests of each individual seller to draw the attention of potential buyers to the merits of his particular product or service, for example. But when hundreds or thousands of individual sellers all do the same thing, they create a cacophony of competing messages: marketing overload. Likewise, it makes sense for each individual seller to do his best to differentiate his particular product or service. But added together, the resulting market complexity can make choice a headache and chore for the buyer. In this way, the combined efforts of marketers actually increase consumers’ transaction costs – the costs buyers incur finding and accessing the value they want. Precisely because these negative system effects are not created by solely by the individual actions of any one firm, they cannot be addressed by individual firms either. We need new market mechanisms, which operate at a different level, to do this. That is one of the functions of the buyer centric business: to create new ways to help individuals cut through the negative consequences of these negative system effects.

	solution assembly Traditional sellers create value in an industrial age way. By making lots of the same things cheaply and excellently (and then selling these things to as many different people as possible) they generate economies of scale which can be translated into value for consumers. The requirements of ‘value in my life’ cut across this industrial age, scale-driven logic. Most desired outcomes – such as a well maintained home, or orderly, efficient finances – depend on the seamless integration of many different things (a range of different products, bits of service and relevant information) to create one overall excellent personal experience. At this level, therefore, the operational drivers and logic of most sellers work at cross purposes to the actual needs of individuals. Seller-centric businesses tend to be consummate ingredient producers; buyer centric businesses fill the gap by focusing more on solution assembly. Seller-centric businesses work according to the logic of ‘make and sell’. Buyer-centric solution assemblers work according the logic of ‘source and integrate’.
	genuine personalisation and customisation For the traditional seller, customisation starts from a standard product (what we make) and then tweaks its features to meet the specific needs of individual customers: it works backwards from the product to the person. Buyer centric services start with the individual – his specific circumstances, priorities, needs, goals etc – and then work forwards towards the products, services and information needed to maximise his personal productivity and profitability.
	where economies of scale fail The traditional business makes the fruits of operational economies of scale available to its customers via lower prices and better quality products and services. But there are large swathes of individual need that are still not touched by such operational economies of scale. A simple example: soap powder companies are excellent at producing good value, high quality soap powders. But they have not generated equivalent scale benefits in other aspects of clothes washing: e.g. doing the ironing. Also, because of the scale at which they operate, traditional businesses are able to employ armies of specialists, often arranged into specialist departments and functions such as finance, law, logistics, personnel/human resources, marketing, operations, whose job it is to develop and apply best practices, accumulate useful knowledge, etc. When individuals make their own lives they engage in a full range of similar tasks. But they do not have the resources to employ specialist professionals dedicated to ‘organisational learning’ and ‘process improvement’. By building new economies of scale around the common problems faced by individuals in their lives, buyer-centric business brings the professionalism and efficiency of the corporate world to individuals. A trivial example: Every year, millions of individuals go to market to buy, say, household appliances such as cookers, fridges and freezers. On each such occasion, each individual does his own ‘market research’ to find the best product for his circumstances. By aggregating, storing, and updating such information, trading agents (see below) enable individuals to share the costs of such research, and to access richer, more relevant purchasing information much more efficiently and effectively.
	new markets in personal assets Traditional sellers are focused on closing sales of their particular products. They are not focused on helping the other side of this transaction – individuals – go to market. In particular, they are not focused on helping individuals maximise the value of marketable personal assets such as personal information and attention. Yet these markets – for information from and about individuals, and for means of gaining their attention – are huge and growing. Buyer centric businesses help individuals to package and bring these assets to market and maximise the value they generate for the individual. By bringing many different individuals’ assets to market in a collective way they realise new economies of scale (see above), just as retailers create buying power by aggregating the many different purchases of individual customers.
	community formation and emotional authenticity There are some forms of value that cannot be made in factories and sold in shops. They can only be ‘made’ by individuals and realised in their own lives: things like meaning, emotional fulfilment, satisfying relationships with others and happiness. Traditional business’ forte is the rational and impersonal: efficiency, productivity, return on investment etc. Sellers may appeal to individuals’ emotions as a way of closing sales of their products, but assisting the individual in the quest to maximise his or her ‘emotional bottom line’ is not their business. Specialist forms of buyer-centric business – ‘passion partners’ – make this their business: by, for example, organising and facilitating communities, events and services devoted to the pursuit of personal passions and concerns.

4) What are the main forms of buyer-centric commerce?

There will be as many and varied buyer centric business models as there are seller-centric businesses (e.g. different types of manufacturer, retailer, financial service provider, utility provider etc) today. There will also be as many different ways of categorising them: by industry or sector, by type of firm, type of customer segment, role ‘in my life’, etc.

One suggested way of categorising the main buyer centric business opportunities is via a parallel with traditional business. Traditional businesses do three generic things: source inputs, process these inputs into outputs, and realise the value of these outputs.

The three main forms of buyer centric business do exactly the same – except with and for individuals. They help the individual source inputs, process these inputs into outputs, and realise value – ‘in my life’. Specifically, they help individuals:

1) go to market to source and sell value (trading or buying agency).

2) improve the efficiency and productivity of personal operations (the activities individuals undertake to ‘make’ their life) and to improve the productivity of personal assets such as time, money, energy, information, emotion and attention. One umbrella term for such tasks could be solution assembly.

3) help the individual realise personal goals (passion partnership).

For a detailed discussion of such models see The New Bottom Line and The Support Economy (see Further Reading below).

5) How will buyer centric business initiatives earn their keep?

Like any other business: by adding value and cutting costs. Buyer-centric businesses do this in three main ways.

1) by filling the value gaps, buyer-centric businesses offer new dimensions of value which people are prepared to pay more for: e.g. understanding an individual’s specific needs and bringing together all the component parts to make it happen

2) because they start with individuals and their needs (rather than standardised products), buyer-centric businesses have access to rich, detailed, accurate, up-to-date information about demand. They can use this information to cut the costs both buyers and sellers incur in going to market.

3) by monetising the value of personal assets such as money, information and attention, buyer centric businesses generate new revenue streams which are not available to traditional sellers. (For example, they can gather information from individuals about intended purchases and sell this information on to interested sellers, on a permission-only basis of course.)

Buyer-centric businesses use many and varied mechanisms to raise revenue. Possible mechanisms include commission and transaction fees, service charges, membership fees etc., often in a complex mix. But the economic content of their business – added value and reduced cost – is simple and straightforward.

6) Why haven’t existing seller centric firms addressed the challenge of ‘value in my life’?

Traditional sellers have steered clear of addressing the value gaps for three main reasons. Simply put, they are:

1) I can’t so I won’t: a structural obstacle stands in the way of the firm delivering a certain form of value

2) I would if I could: an operational obstacle limits the firm’s ability to meet the need

3) I don’t want to: the corporation’s own internal motivations stand in the way of it addressing the need, even when it is clearly identified.

Let’s look at these (overlapping) obstacles in turn.

1) Structural obstacles arise when the firm is simply not geared up to addressing the particular need in question, because for instance, it does not have the infrastructure, assets, know how, etc to do so. At the trivial level, for example, a firm whose legacy assets and infrastructure revolve around making cars is unlikely to focus on a customer’s need for ice cream. He leaves that to the ice cream maker.

This ‘division of labour’ between producers would work perfectly if no needs ever fell between their various stools. But as we have seen, the common characteristics of seller-centric value creation mean that there are some dimensions of value, such as those addressed by solution assembly, passion partnership, or ‘maximising person assets’ (see above) that no sellers are organised to address. No seller-centric business builds infrastructure or operations designed to help individuals maximise ‘value in my life’. Negative system effects (see Question 3 above) represent another structural obstacle, that simply cannot be addressed by individual firms.

2) Operational obstacles are created by the limits of the firm’s own internal operational efficiency. There are many things companies could do to add value, improve quality, or otherwise improve customers’ lives. But because they cannot find a way of doing these things profitably, they do not do them. Once again, this is true in a trivial sense. If a supplier could find a way of maximising profits by selling us all luxury yachts at a price we could all afford, it would.

But it’s also true at a more fundamental level. The operational imperatives of the traditional firm require it to focus on the requirements of vendor efficient supply – how to make what we make and sell it as efficiently and effectively as possible. Vendor efficient supply is not a choice, it is a necessity. It is how the firm creates value for customers. If it fails to maximise its own internal efficiency as a vendor, it won’t survive long in a competitive market. Yet, by definition, this focus on vendor efficient supply means a lack of focus on the buyer-centric requirements of customer efficient demand such as solutions, reduced transaction costs etc.

3) Motivational obstacles are generated by firms’ own goals and objectives. Because sellers are focused on maximising the value of their sales, for example, it is not in their interests to provider customers with buyer centric information which may direct a potential buyer to a competitor’s offer. Likewise, firms tend to avoid value offers and innovations which compromise their quest for improved profitability.

From the seller-centric firm’s point of view, each of these obstacles and limits are so natural and obvious that they hardly seem worth mentioning. That’s precisely the point. It’s the inherent taken-for-granted features of our current commercial system that create the need for a new and different buyer-centric approach – one that reaches the parts of value that seller-centricity either cannot or does not want to reach.

7) But marketing is all about focusing on customers and identifying and meeting their needs. Surely, it’s the purpose of marketing to solve all these problems?

No, not at all. Marketing is a corporate function, designed to meet the needs of the corporation. It was not invented or designed to challenge the structural, operational and motivational limits of seller-centricity. It was designed to help sellers maximise their potential within these limits.

Marketing meets the needs of the corporation in two main ways.

First, by ‘focusing on the customer’ (understanding the customer’s needs), it helps to turn these needs into sales. Customer focus is just a means to the corporation’s end of closing more sales, more profitably. When customer focus does this job well, it generates huge win-wins between buyers and sellers. But as we have seen (above), the corporation stops focusing on customers’ needs as soon as it cannot find a way of turning these needs into profitable sales.

Second, once the company has created the product or service concerned, marketing helps the company realise its value in the marketplace by persuading as many customers as possible to buy it. Here, the marketer does not even pretend to focus on the needs of the customer/buyer. Here, the marketer is focused 100% on meeting the needs of the seller. Instead of trying to get the company to do what the customer wants, the marketer’s job is to get the customer to do what the company wants: ‘buy my brand!’.

It is precisely the seller-centric essence of modern marketing that creates the need for new buyer-centric services.

For analysis of the limitations of modern marketing see Right Side Up and The Cluetrain Manifesto (see books).

8) How big is the buyer-centric business opportunity?

The honest answer is, we don’t know – though we suspect it is Very Big. Measuring the size of this potential is difficult. That’s partly because ‘the market’ for such services is still in its infancy, but also because it cuts across existing market definitions and boundaries.

At one and the same time buyer-centric commerce does three things.

1) It reconfigures the way existing markets work: effectively replacing and reengineering many of today’s seller-centric mechanisms and processes for matching supply to demand and connecting buyers to sellers. Currently these matching and connecting tasks account for around a half of all economic activity – including marketing and marketing communications, market research, retailing, distribution etc.

2) It reconfigures existing industry and market offerings and redraws existing industry and market boundaries by subsuming many traditional seller-centric value propositions into bigger, broader offerings. Just as a sandwich bar subsumes the outputs of ingredient suppliers such as butter makers and bread makers, buyer centric solution assemblers subsume the outputs of many sellers into their services. Every consumer-facing industry – including product manufacture, retailing, financial services, telecommunications, media and utilities – could be radically affected by the rise of trading agents and/or solution assemblers.

3) It creates new markets by opening up new, additional dimensions of value in areas such as consumer agency, customer knowledge, attention management, time management, and passion partnership.

Buyer centric commerce therefore subsumes, supplements, complements, and substitutes for traditional seller-centric forms of value and revenue streams. The complex, evolving relationship between the two makes a clear measure of one versus the other difficult.

An additional piece of work-in-progress’ is identifying the likely ‘early adopters’ for different forms of buyer centric service – and the eventual size of these different groupings as BCC matures. Key point: buyer-centric commerce appeals to many different demographic and psychographic groups, in many different modes and occasions. While concierge-style ‘life managers’ may appeal to the cash rich, time poor, for example, some trading agency services might appeal more to the money poor. While passion partners will appeal to those seeking high emotional involvement, many solution assembly services will appeal to those who want to minimise involvement and maximise ‘outsourcing’. In short, buyer-centric markets will be as complex as today’s seller-centric markets – and individuals – are.

9) Why is all this happening now?

Because of a unique combination of forces – the pressure for change from buyers, the need for change on the part of companies, and the opportunities for change opened up by new technologies. Together, they are making buyer centric commerce possible for the first time. Indeed, inevitable.

Question 3 above (value gaps) analyses the pressure for change from buyers. The important point here is that the more seller-centric wealth creation systems mature, the higher proportion of one set of needs are met (those needs that it is good at meeting), while another set of needs (those represented by the value gaps) remains neglected. That’s why, today, many of the biggest unmet needs revolve around value gaps.

Companies are also discovering the need to change as seller-centric commerce matures. Compared to a hundred years ago say, when the potential of mass industrial production was only becoming apparent, most of its ‘low hanging’ fruits have now been captured. Market after market has moved from undercapacity to overcapacity.

Companies are finding it hard to differentiate their offerings and grow. Yesterday, ‘more of the same’ was a sure-fire route to profitable growth. Today, the corporate pressure to open up new dimensions of value is mounting.

At the same time, new technologies are making new business models possible. Even ten years ago, buyer-centric commerce might have been a nice idea, but we didn’t have the ability to make it a reality. Today, however, burgeoning new information technologies are enabling us to gather, store, analyse, process and distribute the enormous amounts of complex and detailed information that’s needed if we are to ‘work forward’ from individuals’ idiosyncratic needs to markets, rather than ‘working backwards’ from standardised products and services to target customers.

Also, by automating administration, speeding communication and allowing for new divisions of information labour, these emerging technologies also cut the costs of information-rich business, improve operational flexibility and make real-time responsiveness and new value offerings possible. (For more on this, see Shoshana Zuboff and Jim Maxmin’s discussion of distributed capitalism in The Support Economy, and the discussion of ‘marketspaces’ in Promiscuous Customers: Invisible Brands - see books ). They also enable, for the first time, efficient, large scale flows of peer-to-peer and ‘bottom up’ flows of information from buyers to sellers (as opposed to the ‘top down’ flows of information that characterise seller-centric business models).
 

It’s this combination of pressure and possibility that makes buyer-centricity such a powerful idea today.

10) So how can existing companies migrate to buyer-centric commerce?

The honest answer is ‘we don’t know, because it hasn’t been done yet’. But we do have plenty of ideas. (Look out for our forthcoming discussion paper, Crossing the chasm). The existence of so many unanswered questions is why we need a Buyer Centric Commerce Forum – to act as a hot house and clearing house of ideas and to help interested practitioners tackle the practicalities. (For more on BCCF activities, go to www.buyercentric.com)

11) But hang on a minute. Haven’t you just argued that inherent structural, operational and motivational obstacles mean that existing businesses can never rise to the challenge of buyer-centric commerce?

Yes. And no. Buyer-centric commerce is definitely not ‘more of the same’. It’s different. It requires the invention of new business models. As long as today’s companies continue to accept and work within the limits described above, they won’t be able to rise to the challenge of buyer-centricity. They will remain seller-centric.

But if they accept the need to transcend these limits – well, that’s a different matter.

What we have to remember is this. A buyer-centric business is effectively a new business, whether it emanates from a one-man start-up or from the biggest corporation in the world. Once we accept that BCC requires the launch of a new type of business (rather than representing a new ‘marketing’ opportunity for existing businesses) we are in a position to make progress.

12) Why should today’s sellers bother with buyer-centricity?

The simple answer is: ‘carrot and stick’. If you are currently in a fast-growing, highly profitable market with zero competition, you probably don’t need to worry about buyer-centricity. In most other circumstances buyer centric commerce will at some stage present a real opportunity or a serious threat. Probably both.

Buyer-centric commerce is an opportunity because a) those able to make the change will open up huge new growth markets, and b) those sellers who are able to adapt to a buyer-centric environment will be able to unleash powerful new efficiencies and innovation possibilities (see below).

It’s a threat because the emergence of buyer-centric services will undermine many existing sellers’ value propositions and go-to-market strategies (see Question 8, how big is the opportunity?)

A key point to note: The structural, operational and motivational limits that create value gaps for individuals are the same limits that constrain companies’ ability to find profitable growth. Today’s corporations are obsessed by the need to find profitable growth by developing new value propositions (and therefore revenue streams), attracting new customers, keeping existing ones, building trusting relationships, etc.

But as we’ve seen, many of the biggest potential new markets revolve around value gaps. And the way existing sellers go to market is often counterproductive. Precisely because sellers are pushing their own interests and agendas, they find it difficult to earn the customer trust and loyalty they so desperately yearn for. Buyer-centricity breaks this logjam.

Not all businesses can or should become buyer-centric, however (see Question 13 below). Existing sellers stand to benefit from the rise of buyer-centricity precisely because it earns consumer investment in the marketing process – e.g. the value of offering up detailed, personal information about ‘what I want, and what I am looking for’. This investment (and the related reengineering of matching and connecting processes and mechanisms) is a source for potentially powerful new win-wins between buyers and sellers.

Seller-centricity was generated by an industrial age, whose big win-wins were created by mass production and distribution. Buyer-centricity is being generated by an information age, whose biggest win-wins will be generated by using information richness to transform the processes of exchange. (As we saw in Question 8 above, the information-intensive processes of matching supply to demand and connecting buyers and sellers now account for a half of all economic activity in mature industrial economies).

13) So should every business seek to become buyer-centric?

Definitely not. Buyer-centric commerce represents a huge opportunity, but it is still a bounded opportunity. Buyer-centricity assumes the existence of sellers! There is still an enormous amount of value that can – and needs to be – generated by non-buyer-centric businesses.

Companies say, in electronics, pharmaceuticals or entertainment which generate their value via genuine innovation – by developing and applying new technologies or creating new intellectual property – are by definition ‘seller-centric’. Their value genuinely does come from ‘within our operations’ rather than being ‘made in my life’. We need them.

Likewise, buyer-centricity does not mean the end of producers, just as the industrial revolution did not mean the end of agriculture. To the contrary, buyer-centric commerce desperately needs efficient, effective producers as the launching pad and producer of the necessary inputs of its services. And its very information richness will accelerate the development and production of new products and services. Ironically, it is buyer-centricity’s (not marketing’s) ability to unleash and identify demand that will help sellers sell more, more profitably.

At the same time, however, both innovators and producer/sellers will discover the need to adjust their operations and marketing to an increasingly buyer-centric environment – just as farmers found they needed to adjust to an industrial environment, and eventually became ‘industrialised’ themselves.

So who is best suited to buyer-centric commerce? The best answer, perhaps, is those consumer-facing companies that have the customer relationships, trust, company cultures, infrastructure etc that can be leveraged and repurposed to help create buyer-centric services. Potential candidates range from manufacturers through to retailers, financial services companies, media companies, telcos and utilities.

Some buyer-centric initiatives will come from start-ups. Some from already-big corporations and brands. Both have their natural advantages and disadvantages.

Start-ups don’t have to worry about legacy assets and cultures, can focus completely on the task at hand without being diverted by corporate agendas, budgeting processes and politics, and are small enough to see the benefits of growing with a small but growing market. Established companies and brands have the benefits of an installed customer base, trust and reputation, financial and other resources, and infrastructure which can be repurposed to buyer-centric ends. In many cases, the ideal is a combination of both – which is why we expect to see many alliances and partnerships between big and small businesses wanting to explore buyer-centric opportunities.

14) So what do I do on Monday morning?

The most important thing is to realise that buyer-centricity is new, different – and for real.

Once that hurdle is cleared, there are plenty things you can do, even from within a traditional seller-centric firm.. You can:
 

	start identifying the value gaps that really matter to your customers and potential customers.
	start identifying different customer segments for whom different value gaps are critical.
	look again at your company’s own capabilities and competencies to see how they can be redeployed and ‘repurposed’ to start addressing those value gaps; to help individuals make more, better use of their time, money, information, attention, passions and so on.
	start building the ongoing relationships, the win-win transparent company culture, the ‘on my side’ trust, the responsive operations, the two-way information flows etc, that represent basic building blocks of most buyer centric business models.
	start identifying your own capability gaps – where you’re currently unable to start addressing important value gaps – and start filling them, either by yourself or via new partnership and alliances.
	start bringing all these different elements together in the form of new business models.

15) A new learning agenda

Buyer-centricity isn’t going to be a nine day wonder. It’s not some marketing or other business fad, to be pushed by a few self-interested vendors, only to be replaced by a new fad a few years down the road. Like the emergence of mass production, distribution and exchange, it heralds a fundamental, long-term, complex, structural change in the nature of business and in the relationships between buyers and sellers.

This transformation (involving significant elements of both evolution and revolution) will unfold at different paces across different companies, industries, countries, customer segments etc. It will not evolve in a predictable, straight-line sort of way. There are too many variables, too much still to learn.

This learning agenda includes:
 

	fleshing out possible BC business models, including their different value offerings, revenue streams and cost structures
	developing and making the most of appropriate infrastructure, technology, software etc.
	identifying and addressing new and different attitudinal and needs segments
	educating both businesses and buyers as to the nature of BC business, its potential and how it works
	changing long-ingrained corporate selling habits and consumer buying habits
	earning new levels of ‘on my side’ trust
	identifying viable migration paths for existing businesses

Like Europeans stumbling upon America five hundred years ago, with buyer centricity we are stumbling upon a new world of value. This new world still has to be mapped in detail, and explored.