What makes marketing and commercial development so difficult in the economic Era of Trust Networks?

Peter Drucker predicted both the closing of the Information Age in 1995 and the subsequent emergence of a fifth era of modern economic history. Using his formulation for this new era, we named it the Era of Trust Networks.

Trust Networks comprise social networks and curated collections of user-generated insights and best practices that support the economic success of individual social networks.

Trust Networks affect market behaviors, compelling marketers to find and serve customers in different ways than in the past.

• Markets form much faster than just 10 years ago.
• First-to-market competitors often create entrenched if not unassailable market positions at very early market stages.
• Once entrenched, these first-to-market competitors quickly dominate the market and enter adjacent ones.
• The first 10 to 20 customers of a new technology often determine whether or not the first-to-market vendor will create an entrenched market position.
• Serving the wrong first 10 or 20 customers often forfeits any advantage of a first-to-market vendor.
• The efficiency of the service-fulfillment methodologies of the first-to-market vendors often constitutes the decisive factor in creating sustainable advantage: unassailable market positions.
• How a firm uses its first 10 to 20 customers to prototype its service-fulfillment methodologies exerts tremendous influence of valuation of the firm.
• Success in the Era of Trust Networks entails a strategic collaboration with your first 10 to 20 customers of a new technology; these customers help you define your market, differentiate your value proposition, “solutioneer” your service-fulfillment methodologies, and create a tribe.