The job of the marketer is to push whatever manufacturers decide to produce onto consumers, right? Ah, not so much. Forrester’s Emily Riley recently wrote that as an interactive marketing analyst her job is not to “help marketers trick consumers into buying bad products….” Instead she says part of her role is to help brands create products that deliver value to consumers rather than forcing products upon them.

Brands are investing increasing amounts of time and resources to build relationships with customers through social media. Isn’t the next step, then, integrating the information gleaned from social media monitoring and online customer engagement into product development?