There's a lot of talk about conversations and interaction and how the web is changing the nature of communication and branding. (Some main arguments here; and all arguments if you read Russell's blog regularly.)
An even bigger, and likely related, shift seems to be an increasing general business literacy. We shortly received a mail from a 13 year old girl, asking us questions about "success factors in television ads", "how to address various target groups", etc. Our young mailer then listed various target groups you will find in any client brief.
It is nothing new that plump 'run and buy'-messages don't work too well with a generation grown up with MTV. However, I always thought this to be on a more visual and content-related level. Now, it appears to me, that the change goes a bit deeper. Expansion strategies and brand extensions, appear to be topics people can easily converse about. In the same way as weather and crop developments have been everyday topics for decades, business is turning into a chit chat topic for the urban Mr. and Ms. Youandme of today.
As this happens, it seems that people become aware of their economic value. An article in last week's Economist about on-line advertising listed several emergent business models where individuals earn money for looking at ads. This Attention-for-Sale approach is, for now, limited to specific areas of communication. Nevertheless, it might hint to a change towards a completely different relationship between companies, their brands, and consumers. The consumers, in today's sense of the word, might seize to be a consumer and become something like a (micro-)business. Brands would then need to manage their relationship with these other businesses in quite a different way. Maybe this would look more like today's B2B models. Certainly, it would require a different approach to branding. It seems likely, though, that the approach heralded by everyone speaking about conversations and interaction (see above) will prove even more promising.
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