Influx

Influx looked at Branducation as a way for brands to educate their consumers and create a richer relationship.

However, there’s another way to look at it.

A means to activate people and to get them to play a more active role as brand producers.

Simply put, armed with more knowledge, people can do more for your brands and your company.

This isn’t Influx’s thinking, but the idea of Xavier Comtesse, who heads the Geneva branch of think-tank Avenir Suisse

Bruno Guissani provides a nice summation of Xavier’s thinking

“High and higher productivity “is the only way for developed countries to avert the collapse of welfare and social insurance systems due to the aging of their populations”. The real productivity gains, says Xavier, won’t come from digitizing processes, although that’s an essential enabler, but “from the new relation between producers and customers, from the consumer’s deeper integration into the value chain, from the amateurs’ growing role in the creative process”, and from “the transfer of know-how”, implicit or explicit, prompted by all this.”

So, turning consumers into producers is a way to generate productivity gains and avert the collapse of welfare and social insurance systems.

Big stuff indeed, especially since most companies are only scratching the surface of the idea by letting their consumers to make ads for them. This is way beyond that and involves engaging the consumer in a far deeper way.

Xavier is writing a book about the “Direct Economy” that will be out this November.