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Caveat venditor—let the seller beware
While marketers look for more ways to get personal with customers, including new tricks with “big data,” customers are about to get personal in their own ways, with their own tools. Soon consumers will be able to:
Control the flow and use of personal data
Build their own loyalty programs
Dictate their own terms of service
Tell whole markets what they want, how they want it, where and when they should be able to get it, and how much it should cost
And they will do all of this outside of any one vendor’s silo.
This new landscape we’re entering is what Doc Searls calls The Intention Economy—one in which demand will drive supply far more directly, efficiently, and compellingly than ever before. In this book he describes an economy driven by consumer intent, where vendors must respond to the actual intentions of customers instead of vying for the attention of many.
New customer tools will provide the engine, with VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) providing the consumer counterpart to vendors’ CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems. For example, imagine being able to change your address once for every company you deal with, or combining services from multiple companies in real time, in your own ways—all while keeping an auditable accounting of every one of your interactions in the marketplace. These tantalizing possibilities and many others are introduced in this book.
As customers become more independent and powerful, and the Intention Economy emerges, only vendors and organizations that are ready for the change will survive, and thrive. Where do you stand?
Imagine a world where unknown companies can’t track your every digital move, and where you don’t have to click, agree and assume all the liability in every transaction. Technology writer Doc Searls envisions that world as the future “Intention Economy,” a setting in which people access “Vendor Relationship Management” (VRM) tools that make vendor-customer interactions far more equitable than they are now. Searls intelligently analyzes the web today, the one-sidedness of vendor-customer relationships and the changes VRM can enable. Although tech-savvy readers will enjoy Searls’s conversational style, getAbstract warns that nongeeks might find some of his concepts hard to grasp. Even so, Searls’s vision is relevant to vendors as well as customers.
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Posted May 1, 2012
Doc Searls focuses on the four-party economy in this very interesting exploration of how the Web economy is beginning to favor agents that help to focus the intent of buyers, via capabilities such as "concierge"-like services in the cloud or via API-driven services that help us to understand what it is that can meet our demands - sometimes even before we've expressed them explicitly. Understanding the intent lying behind demands is the key to driving markets to the right buyers at the right time. You might call it inferential value generation, a type of service that comes to conclusions about things based on big data analysis and intersecting it with personal profiles. Doc has some deep thinking on this topic, but he presents it in an easy-to-read format that makes it fun to learn about this concept.
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Overview
Caveat venditor—let the seller beware
While marketers look for more ways to get personal with customers, including new tricks with “big data,” customers are about to get personal in their own ways, with their own tools. Soon consumers will be able to:
Control the flow and use of personal data
Build their own loyalty programs
Dictate their own terms of service
Tell whole markets what they want, how they want it, where and when they ...