I started my consulting career by focusing on electric and natural gas utilities. At the time, most utilities were thinking through the impact of potential industry deregulation which at the highest level would unbundle generation, transmission, and distribution functions.
Most companies were more than happy to consider the prospect of removing residential consumers from their service model. Why? Because unlike the large profits generated by industrial and commercial accounts, consumers were a hassle to serve given their sheer number and different types of service situations.
Generation and transmission happen at scale; distribution to individual homes encounters the last mile issue. Think about this with regard to marketing; social campaigns are creating pull marketing scenarios where consumers too often discover disconnected endpoints.
In today’s Dachis Group Collaboratory, my colleague Tom Cummings discusses the last mile in social business and how companies can start solving for this issue: Social Media Middlemen.
Hope to see you at the Chiat Awards show Peter. How many entries were there?