Customer Advocacy: A New Era in Marketing?

have been active as a marketing researcher since 1964, or much of what Wilkie and Moore (2003) call Eras III and IV of scholarly research. The field of management science in marketing has grown in both scope and impact during this time. My work has been centered on new product development, with models from assessor to information acceleration. Most recently, I have been working on issues of trust, advice for consumers, and the discovery of new product opportunities by “listening in ” to the online dialogue between a trusted advisor and a customer (Urban and Hauser 2004). Because I have done this recent work on the Internet, I sensed a sea change in the underlying consumer behavior. Something had shifted, and it took me a while to discover that customers had gained new power in buying