I propose that companies should start to think of their customers as being as liquid as their (public market) investors. Think of the lengths to which publicly traded companies will go to keep Wall Street happy. Think about the care and feeding of that segment of stakeholders, the willingness to take immense personal risk, and the careful management of expectations that goes into a publicly traded company's management of the investment community. Considering the reality of instantaneous punishment for poor performance, it is understandable that liquid investors represent a powerful motivating force to management.
I would posit that given the proliferation of new technologies (reducing switching costs in innumerable ways across innumerable industries) and sources of information (creating instantaneous market knowledge) that many companies are going to find that their customers are able to move more freely and will do so more aggressively in coming years than anything they could have ever imagined based on historical customer mobility. I believe customers are becoming liquid.
Companies that get ahead of the curve are going to have cutting edge tools for understanding the needs of their customer constituencies, creating highly interactive communities (and social networks), and have new tools for measuring and forecasting how they are and will be perceived in the market. Companies that fall behind the curve are going to find they know less-and-less about their worst customers (the best ones having already been poached by competitors).
What would a company change were it to start to think about its customers as a liquid community?