Thanks to the continual evolution of social media, we have a growing set of useful tools for gathering feedback about our brand reputation. Online branded communities, for example, are becoming increasingly valuable meeting spaces where community members and brand marketers can easily engage in meaningful conversation around specific products and services, and even the brands themselves.
This increase in brand–consumer conversation is beginning to change consumer expectations. They see that we marketers are part of their communities, and assume that we are listening, hearing, and planning product and service changes accordingly.
The problem here is that sometimes we marketers are so committed to our own brand experience that we may be resistant to change and have trouble actually hearing when our consumers are trying to ask us to change components of our brand. In order to work around our own (natural and understandable) resistance to change, we need to take a step back from our fierce attachment to what we believe makes our brand successful.