On “Entrepreneur in the digital world”, Ruud Veltenaar started off the morning session with an intriguing statement, “Consumer is NOT king”. For a long time, businesses live by the opposite statement. However, he stressed that in this digital era, “Consumer is a dictator”. In his observation, consumers dictates what s/he wants, how s/he wants it, and how much s/he is willing to pay for it. Loyalty is meaningless when there is no real added-value to the product/service.

Two very important practise that any business need to focus on, according to Veltenaar, are 1) the consumers, i.e. your target market and 2) your competitors. He gave some astounding rise and fall case studies, Compaq vs Dell, ABN Amro, KLM (and other airlines) vs EasyJet (and other low-cost airlines). He has strongly emphasised that the current market is changing very rapidly, much faster than we can expect. Within years, a company can fall without knowing what the consumers want and keeping up with your competitors. For instance, he cautioned that Farecast is making drastic changes to the airline industry, whereby it allows consumers to fly at the cheapest rate available. Not to even mention about the drastic changes within months in the music industry!

Consumer behaviour has changed, and it will continue to change. But will large companies be able to keep up with the changes? I’m putting my money on M&As.

Finale
Besides the first morning sessions, the 34th ICT Symposium was mostly crap. Now that I know, it makes me wonder whether I should go for next year, or any others…

At least it provides me with an up-to-date happenings, socialise around, and get inspirations.