Kate Sayre, a partner in the New York office of The Boston Consulting Group, cautions that such behavior doesn't necessarily suit all shoppers -- or all product categories. "If you're looking for a TV, it works well," she says. "You've done your research, you enter the product number and acquire it a lower price. But it's harder to do with things like apparel, where trends change so quickly and there are no model numbers and you have different sizes. These kinds of search applications favor products that are research-driven, high-involvement. They work less well with more impulse-driven products, items you buy more than once over the course of the year."

For marketers, new applications like Slifter -- which returns sponsored product information based on keyword/location searches -- take the Internet's search-advertising model to mobile phones. Launched at the end of 2006, Slifter now has 250 million product listings at over 100,000 locations. "We're not a fixed cost [for advertisers]," says Alex Muller, Slifter's CEO. "A billboard will cost you X number of dollars, whether five people see it or 500. We have a pay-per-click model. It's very much a pull-marketing technique."

So how does a marketer respond to new pressure on pricing? Conroy offers one suggestion he discussed with a CEO that may apply to other companies in different businesses.

"You need to figure out how to creatively bundle and sell solutions as opposed to products," he says. "If you're trying to compete on an individual dimension-by-dimension basis, that's not a place where you'll want to be. Unless you're the price leader, you don't want to compete solely on price. Unless you're the quality health-and-wellness or low-calorie, best-warranty, best-service provider, you don't want to compete on just that. You're never going to be the best in class at all of those. What you need to figure out is how to bundle those parts in a way where the sum is greater than any individual dimension. So the customer might say, 'I've added up those 10 things, and they've bundled six of them in such a way that they are more appealing to me than any one of those six.'"

While the debut of Google Android last week was a relatively low-key affair before a group of mobile-industry execs, the implications may well reach beyond handsets and to a new consumer world in which the Internet is accessible by any number of touch points throughout the day. Google may well be on the way to becoming the world's largest ad agency, powered not by messages forged from focus groups -- populated by people who may have little or no knowledge about the brands involved -- but by consumers with a definite point of view. Marketers ignore those voices at their own risk.

"Brands give short shrift to aspects of CGM that indicts or exposes the brand, and they really have to think that one out," concludes BuzzMetrics's Blackshaw. "Yes, Dove's 'Evolution' won the Cannes film prize, but the more celebrated stories that consumers have talked about online really focused on embarrassing moments for brands. The Comcast 'Sleeping Technician,' the AOL customer-service snafu-- those things find a whole life on the Internet that companies really need to internalize, because they act like advertising. And it's almost impossible to erase off the slate, as Google search results make very, very clear."