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There is little doubt that the changes we are seeing in the economy and in business practice amount to a revolution of sorts. Pick up any business magazine and you will see the word 'revolution' somewhere in one of the headlines, or you will see some claim the economy now is different. 'The New Economy', 'The Internet Economy', 'The Knowledge Economy' or 'The Experience Economy' and similar terms crop up endlessly. Phrases such as these key into a very real sense that a revolution is taking place. Usually these concentrate on branding, knowledge and knowledge workers, and corporate culture - and of course their increased importance in the virtual world of the Internet and e-commerce. These areas of change - supported by an emphasis on customer relationships, service and experience - are certainly the most significant in commerce today. It is no coincidence that they each relate to intangibles or that they are happening simultaneously. Rather than see the rise of brands, knowledge, culture and the virtual as merely contingent events. They are in fact part of a bigger revolution currently underway in developed economies and commerce: the intangible revolution. The creation, deployment, leverage, management and measurement of intangible assets have never been more important. We are all accustomed to seeing fashion brands commanding higher prices or selling in greater volume. Customers are willing to pay more for a 'brand' almost regardless of production costs. With the rise in 'dot-coms' we are also getting more and more used to seeing company valuations where the tangible assets are relatively negligible compared with the intangible ones. Internet company valuations are the most extreme example, but everywhere in industry intangible assets account for an increasing proportion of the value of companies. 
The four elements of the intangible revolution - brands knowledge, culture, and the virtual - are each attracting an increasing amount of management resource and each has its own growing consultancy industry. The same is true for the related issues of customer relationship management, service, and experience. This is absolutely appropriate given their increasing importance to organisations. However, the tendency to treat each as a separate but related discipline rather than different elements of a momentous change in culture and commerce has so far resulted in a number of issues. The full impact of the intangible revolution on markets. In particular how it affects traditional ideas of consumers is being overlooked. Right now it's the classic case of four blind men encountering an elephant for the first time, with none of them being able to comprehend the entire beast. This situation is, of course, much worse with intangible elephants than with tangible ones. Management resource is being unnecessarily diluted. Each element is treated separately. To some extent companies are being forced to choose between them. To make matters worse, the amount of management resource that is directed towards tangible assets compared with intangible assets is disproportionate in terms of both the value that is created and the opportunity for growth. The lack of a unifying theory. The possibility of developing a consistent and elegant set of management techniques to create, deploy, leverage, manage and measure intangibles in commerce remains unexplored. Why Amazon.com is a pioneer in The Intangible Revolution. - Amazon.com, clearly showing the way in how the virtual can transform commerce, is a very good example of how the different elements of the intangible revolution work together.
- Amazon.com deploys knowledge in at least two vital ways. When Bezos initially had the idea, he found that the book trade was unwittingly well prepared for on-line retailing since everything is indexed and already stored on databases.
- Amazon.com leverages the knowledge of its customers by encouraging them to submit reviews of books that they have read. This relates to both the culture of Amazon and to their brand.
- Within the organisation, and despite its huge market capitalisation, the culture of Amazon.com retains a powerful symbolic reference to its early start-up days: People's desks are made out of old doors instead of bought from expensive office supply companies.
- The Amazon.com brand is one of the best recognised in the US and elsewhere. Bezos has said himself that a high level of marketing expenditure is necessary if he is to win out long-term.
The intangible revolution extends beyond the relative worth of tangible assets to intangible assets, and like all revolutions it will leave behind it a number of casualties who failed to realise the profound changes that were taking place. This is more of a risk than in previous revolutions, since the changes that are taking place happen without fanfare or violence. Because the means and effects of this revolution fit so neatly with what most of us already want and know, it is being embraced - and then taken for granted. If we are to survive as revolutionaries ourselves, we will have to understand how the intangible revolution will affect: - How value is created.
- How the relationship between consumers and producers is changing.
- How products and innovation are transformed by a brand literate society.
- How the changes in commerce that we are witnessing are being reflected in changes to concepts of identity and culture.
Business models scaled on tangible assets or on the constraints and opportunities presented by geography, distribution, time, or size are being radically undermined - particularly by the Internet. You can be global, local, or serve dispersed special interest communities. Two people can service a million customers from a garage in Alabama. Your shop never has to close, and there is always a whole population that is awake and ready to buy stuff. Tangible-oriented business thinking tends to regard knowledge as a side effect of process - something picked up along the way. It assumes that corporate culture serves primarily a human resource function of motivating and retaining staff. Branding is seen as something you 'stick on' at the end. As a result of the intangible revolution knowledge, culture, and especially the brand become the generative force creating new products and services and, as a result, are pivotal in the formulation of corporate strategy. The future heralded by the intangible revolution seems almost to sneak up on you. Here's an example:
On my computer at work I have the BBC's news ticker running. If a headline interests me, I click on it and I can see that story, video footage and related stories appear in my web browser...virtually overnight I kicked a lifetime habit of buying newspapers without even really acknowledging that I had.
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