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Amid rampant globalization involving the breaking down of trade barriers, a continual improvement in infrastructure, the ubiquitous presence of the Internet and continuous innovations ushered in by technological advancements, customers and companies find themselves affected by these fundamental changes in very different ways.

The changes have empowered customers like never before by offering them innumerable options, the ability to easily compare the features and prices of brands, the infrastructure to create communities around the brand and minimal cost to change their brand choice.

While companies have benefited immensely from growing opportunities and the opening of new markets, they are also challenged in facing increasing competition and attracting and retaining customers.

As Internet-based infrastructure has ushered in increased interest and participation in open-source platforms to collaboratively create value, phenomena such as distributed knowledge, virtual value co-creation, social media-influenced customer decisions and crowd-controlled communication of brand identities are increasingly becoming the norm.

Just as the old business paradigm enabled companies to exercise total control over their brands, the new paradigm is challenging the conventional notion.

In the old paradigm, businesses primarily controlled the destinies of their brands based on their internal resources, growth and strategic needs, and their external positioning and competitive demands.

Though brands did cater to the needs of customers, the end users did not have a say in the way brands were managed. But today, examples abound of the ways such singular control of companies over their brands is slipping.

In its effort to restructure its brand portfolio, General Motors decided to kill some of its longstanding, well-regarded brands such as Saturn and Hummer.

While GM’s decision was based on the profitability of these brands and their role in the broader strategy to emerge from bankruptcy, these decisions were poorly received by the loyal customers of the brands.

Not only did customers form informal communities around these brands, they also campaigned across blogs and other online platforms to stop the discontinuation.

Similarly, when Dell was thinking about changing some of the core components for its laptops, such as the processor, the operating system and even the multimedia chips, loyal customers wrote to Dell and expressed their opinions on online forums to force the company’s management to respond.

These are just a couple of examples of a trend in the changed business paradigm.

Although the decision making of companies is based on their overall strategy, the preferences of customers and collaborators need not be.

When they are not aligned, it becomes important for companies to account for the changed realities of perceived control of the brand.

Social media has facilitated a culture of constant and instantaneous diffusion of customer complaints over the Internet. As such, how can companies manage this changing situation of perceived brand control?

Increase customer-brand touch points. The starting point for brands is to recognize and accept the changing trend and strategize to effectively manage it. One of the main reasons that a company’s and customers’ vision of a brand differs is the lack of an active interaction between the two groups.

Indeed, some of the brands that have attained icon status, such as Harley-Davidson and Jeep, have excelled in creating opportunities for customer-brand interaction through novel touch points.

Leverage this evolving trend of brand ownership by creating more customer touch points. Such a strategy would allow customers to directly share their views and opinions with the brand and equally helps the brand to align with customers’ expectations.

Leverage collaborative innovation. An important step for companies is to leverage the power of innovation, not just within their corporate borders but also in collaborations with diverse stakeholders.

As more external stakeholders, such as customers, collaborators and partners, perceive and possess a sense of psychological ownership of a brand, one of the best ways for brands to leverage that is to establish procedures that allow them to systematically extract a sense of brand pride.

IBM fundamentally changed its corporate character by embracing collective and collaborative innovation. Investing in such processes would further facilitate brands to align their image and identity with the way they are perceived by external stakeholders.

Martin Roll is a global business and brand strategist. His Web site is at http://www.martinroll.com.