Businesses that Consumers Have Taken Down:

• Taxi Business with Uber and Lyft

• Hotels with AirBnB and VRBO

• Cable with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon

• Large Retail Boxes with Amazon

• Newspapers with Online News

• The Music Industry with Apple, Spotify, etc.

All of these business models were taken down because they weren’t customer-centric. They were slow, didn’t answer the phone, charged late fees, didn’t offer pricing options, were inflexible with product exchanges, wanted consumers to travel to them and offered no avenue for customer feedback to the marketplace.

Sure, new business models were introduced and greatly helped by technology; however, consumers made them successful because they communicated with each other about convenience, choices, price, speed of delivery and speed of customer service.

Consumers make and break businesses…and move markets. And much of that energy comes through the major communication channel called product reviews.