Customer World

Is your business ready to pick-up intentcast from customers?

The word "intentcast" has been used by Doc Searls, one of the proponents of customera taking control of their own data vs companies take control of the data.  He has written a brilliant piece in Wall Street Journal - Customer as God basis his new book intent economy.

 He makes a very strong point by mentioning that businesses treat customers like a cattle herd and they have to get ready for personal empowerment.

I personally believe this is true and agree with Doc totally. Here's why there's a silent revolution that's happening in the customers' own world:

1. Businesses are increasingly finding a large majority of their customers really don't want them to be reached out to. The digital mediums of mobile, web make this "shut-out" very easy. I have heard customers say that You Tube Ads are annoying - be it the banners or the ads before the videos. They just are blind spots. The best customers don't want to be bugged with messages and worst customers  businesses don't care any way!  They need to find a new model to appeal to both.
2. It is sometimes extremely painful to provide information to businesses and many a times the same information is sought again and again across different parts of the same businesses  and across the internet. Information is not seamlessly transported across the pockets of businesses or across different sites they are present on the web.
3. Customer's personal information is treated with very little respect as tracking by cookies, content is widespread. Search for information is treated as " intent to buy" which may not be the real case in the offline world.  Walking in the high street or mall does not mean we are opening the wallet to buy.
4. Rather "intent to buy" must be treated as information and bussinesses must find flexible ways to build conversations with customers. Not all conversations are purchase conversations.
5. If businesses  own the platform along with customers who intend to know, understand, compare, evaluate and purchase, then at least customers will give them a chance.
6. In my opinion, Intentcast is the end of the sales funnel but bussinesses that lead  customers to the end of this funnel will be the ones that will gain trustshare and then marketshare. 

 

Join the WSJ's data transparency weekend!

Your data is the single biggest business for many existing and emerging companies across the world.

The web browsing you do is tracked thro' your IP and the cookies that get dropped in your PC or tablet leaves trails of our behaviour which many companies trade for money! The mobile phone that you use creates data repository on your location making it valuable information for  retailers, travel companies and leading brand marketers to name a few. Companies need to co-opt customers, collaborate and working with them closely if they want to build trust and meaningful conversations with them.

 

The need to be transparent about your data and its usage - is the single most important priority for companies. WSJ is conducting an event next week on data transparency and they are inviting developers to build free web tools to promote data transaparency and control. Think it is a great initiative and co-opting developers, customers by making them aware of their rights is great first step. 

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Personal data is the new oil!

The world economic forum and many futurists believe personal data is the new asset class that will emerge as a competitive advantage for many marketers. It is important that marketers start using this data  intelligently, judiciously and in a manner that benefits and engages the customer. Else, this is one area that can have a severe backlash from customers just like the occupy the wall street episode.

Personal data may be the new oil but refining and using it sparingly with relevance is becoming a very important issue for marketers to focus and address.

Who is the owner of our personal data?

However,  there is an emerging debate around the ownership of personal data as digital outposts & sites are gathering data about customers like never before. Google recently released a new privacy policy last week which  redefines how this data will be used across all Google properties that we as their customers have an account. The new Google privacy policy reads " We may use the name you provide for your Google Profile across all of the services we offer that require a Google Account.....We also use this information to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads...."

Clearly, the challenge that is becoming a key part of the debate is who is the owner of this personal data  and what of it can be used and by whom.

My View

I personally believe customers should be given control of their data. Customers must give permission about which of this data can be used basis their interests and lifestyle needs to companies, advertisers and marketers. And thereby brands can deliver value to these customers.

Imagine personal data lockers being available which customers can own for a fee(much like the demat of company shares that have happened over years across different countries & markets). There will be several central agencies that hold this data and provide access to customers  - with a front-end which provides flexibility to give permissions to customers to release this data for commercial purposes. If the past few decades were the era of credit bureaus, the coming decades are the era of data bureaus.

Imagine a customer wanting to buy a car ticks the check-box on the need or expresses the need to be a part of a community of interest.Many marketers and companies then vie to build a dialog and a conversation with the customer - not spam her with emails, irrelevant ads and messages on mobiles. All the searches that customer does then become available for relevant ads to be shown to her online. Then, the sales & marketing teams of different marketers & products unlock a new engagement platform to woo this customer.

The customer experience is therefore refined, relevant and customized like never before using the data that is in control in the hands of the customer. 

Imagine the power of this data. Imagine its efficiency. Imagine its effectivness. If personal data has to remain as the new oil, the control & flexibility must be in the hands of the customer.

The emerging era of customer unions!

I was reading an interesting article by Umair Haque on the threat of open customer rebellion and how industrial age businesses are completely unprepared to change the ways they  engage, treat and manage customers.He writes:

"Yesterday's massive, sprawling organizations could pacify "consumers" by buying them off with a discount or three, an overblown celebrity promising the moon, an entirely new "brand" designed as camouflage, or adding an extra blade or five, patty or three, or cylinder or four, and calling it "innovation." But that probably won't pacify people concerned not merely with what they "get," but with what, if anything, you're really contributing to society".

He goes to quote an interesting example:

"ING customers mobilised on Twitter and other social networks to protest at bonuses paid to bosses at the bank, one of the biggest in the country. The threat of direct action raised the spectre of a partial run on ING, terrifying the Dutch establishment. Fred Polhout, union organiser at the bank, says: "People were outraged. We heard about the bloated sums being paid again in the City and in New York; but suddenly the issue exploded on our own front door."

To me this is a lovely articulation of  how unprepared many companies are. It made me think of some interesting analogy of how new information age thinking has to drive changes in industrial age-mindset companies:

1. In the industrial age, there were labor unions who acted as interest groups for community who produced goods. The customer had no power as they were fragmented across markets. The information age is creating customer unions where customers come together to rally against companies which do injustice to them, their enviroment, their community, unfair business relationship & services etc. 
2. The labor unions could take the cause of only one company, theortically speaking. But, customer unions can have members across different products/brands across geographies and pose a larger threat.
3. The customer unions are self-engaging members who pose a potential threat to companies who undermine their power.
4. The customer unions can come together within a few hours and disrupt the brand reputation built over years by companies.
5. The customer unions have the power of internet, social media to engage & collaborate for this cause and will disengage once the cause is achieved.
6. If there were union leaders who drove the labor unions, here there are customer leaders who drive the opinions and issues. Companies need to identify them as they emerge from time to time for different reasons. But address them with agility.
7. Authencity and honesty will be the hallmark of successfully handling these customer unions and companies need to find new innovative methods of handling them openly & with transparency.

It's time companies and marketing departments realize this and find new ways of truly engaging with customers and their opinions.

 

 

 

Data is mine but we as consumers undermined it first!

There is a great article in Time Magazine which talks about "How companies know everything about you?".

There are many relevant points that are being made there but I really don't concur with all the blame &  privacy issues that are being made in the article. I agree with the need for privacy of my data and of course, am against littering of my personal information. But, before we jump of the hook and start  blaming the internet, industry leaders like google, facebook, twitter &  other data marketing companies, we as consumers need to think about the following points:

1. Free email : There is nothing called a free lunch right? When you have a free email id which you have  opted to take and use extensively, the companies need to find a business model to make money. Hence, they decided to build a business model around targeted advertising using the content and information that you access. The money they earn is being used to store our email data, provide uninterrupted access to your email, maintain the infrastructure etc. So, are we as consumers ready to pay for such services and also therefore define or give information access, rights to these companies on our terms? 
2. Customer aggregation platforms have done it for decades, so what's the stress?:  Television, radio station, newspapers did it for decades. The content that consumers watched on TV was subsidized by advertisers, broadcasters & electronic appliance companies to name a few - They paid to reach consumers and group of consumers like you. Every interruption of ' your valuable time' when you watch your favourite movies and soap operas is 'invasion of our privacy'. We chose to live with it, till new digital media like internet, mobile came-in. There were no laws to stop this invasion of privacy. The new media companies have now found a new method to hawk this information. Are we as consumers ready to pay subscription charges for such content and define access rights for this information on our terms?
3. Intermediation leads to social litter, disintermediation protects it: Any intermediator, we know, controls the information, prices and margins. This has happened time and again to us as consumers. The farmer faced this many decades ago as he could not get the right prices for his produce as the intermediators held them to ransom till disintermediators intervened and build an efficient supply chain. The banks are the age-old intermediators who have made pots of profits( and they make it still) by making money on our money!  I see many social media platforms as intermediators - I never was able to connect with my friends who I had lost for ever till they came-in and made it easy. I see it as a huge a benefit. But, the information they hold is a goldmine and they have to find ways to monetize it to remain in business. Are we as consumers willing to pay for being members of these social platforms - even a couple of cents, if we really find them valuable and beneficial? Therefore, we can define access rights to these platforms on our information on our terms? 

To conclude, what I see around me emerging is businesses like information vaults, personal information utlities (PIUs) firms like allow, Personal which talk the right language of consumer control but as a consumer I would like to know what are their terms of agreement with my preferred platforms - social media, TV, email service provider, communities on the Net am a member of, financial services provider, govt.( they trade social security nos. for a price too!) etc.. There needs to be terms of transparency, terms of portability, terms of usage, terms of enagement   etc. before we as consumers jump-in and start embracing these platforms.

Else, this will be a case of one more of the many fads that  we will fall into and we will undermine our data once again!

 

Data-driven advertising - How do we move it beyond the web?

I came across an interesting service platform Meme Machine which has interesting customer-focused applications using data.

Calling itself reactive advertising Meme Machine defines this platform as:

"Reactive advertising is a technology for dynamic customization how display ads look and behave in real-time based on what we know about each viewer and the surrounding factors for each exposure. So instead of one campaign having three different ads, we can run three million different ads, where each is unique for the person watching it. Real-time data and dynamic content are two of the things that makes the Internet really unique. Coming up with the basic ideas for a dynamic ad is just one piece of the puzzle and you also need an engine that can mix up the data and make sure that the right stuff is actually shown to the right people."

Meme Machine has a reaction library and has some cases like Scandinavian Airlines, Swedish Post etc. 

How do we really fuse data that's online, offline and transactional?

To make this more widespread & relevant to a consumer &  marketer, the question that came to my mind really was, how do we use offline data & behaviour for such a service in addition to online information that gets tracked. Imagine a variety of devices and vehicles that consumers today either read, watch, listen, carry along with them - radio( FM), TV, Mobile, Outdoor, Magazines, Newspapers etc.which is not tagged or data rich today.

I believe we still have a long way to go  & innovate here. Here in lies interesting opportunities waiting to be tapped. There must be different applications across devices & media vehicles that must bring this to life. The control, of course, must lie with the consumers to bring all of this together. The applications must talk to each other, pull relevant content, send proactive messages as things happen in each media vehicle or device or by interest tagged by consumers, to bring this conversation & experience to life with each consumer.

When consumer information belongs to consumers!

There's a whole business out there on the web and offline world( direct mail databases, telemarketers etc.) where companies trade your information and make money by way of advertising. They place cookies( without your permission) on the web, track all the information you read, buy and click, use your registration information, get your subscription & transactional data and then bombard you with offers that you may not necessarily want or interested in. Finally, you get fed-up, the companies too get fed-up as there's a diminishing ROI in their marketing efforts and they start searching else where. Then comes a new Google and there's excitement again all round only to wither away after a couple of years! What happens if you as a consumer start trading your information.You as a consumer decide what information would you like to give out and get some returns out of it. That could be the future that's sustainable and  more importantly of value to you.

There are three parties who make money - first YOU, then a central customer information exchange(CCIE) that enables this and an advertiser who seeks to pay for people that they would like to build a dialog with ( remember, I am not using the word - sell, advertise or market!) 

Here's an interesting perspective Jerome brought my attention to:

Each of us is a file of personal data—our age, our sex, our address, the places we go, the things we buy. Imagine bundling thousands of these files.

Bill Densmore has been thinking about this for 14 years. A career journalist who’s shifted to journalism research, Densmore is a fellow at the futurist Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. Each of us has equity in the lives we live, he believes, and it’s time to cash in. His solution is the “information valet project,” a reordered media universe in which dozens of companies compete for the business of brokering our lives for the online news and commentary we covet.

He envisions it working something like this: You choose an InfoValet. It asks you what level of personal information you want to share with the Web sites you visit. At the low end that could basically be your name, rank, and serial number, and at the high end a laundry list of your needs and pleasures. Your InfoValet finds out what sites you want premium—i.e., nonfree—content from, and then it names a price. Its profit will come from charging you a little more than those sites charge it, and what they charge will hinge on the desirability of your “persona” to their advertisers. Densmore can imagine someone wealthy, acquisitive, and candid who’s so desirable he gets to travel the Web for pretty much nothing.
Read more.

My view:  Densmore has a  view of  how information from media can be monetized. It's a great idea & brilliant. But, we don't necessarily live to consume advertising information alone in everything that we do everyday, as we search for information. That sounds quite ridiculous and  ominous to me. Sometimes, I just seek information but necessarily don't need advertising tags next to it. Sometimes, I consume information to buy products, want to know more about some products that I read about or I saw in my friend's place and in this context & time, some advertising information necessarily will help me make better decisions. The context of consumer searching the information to me is important. Sometimes, many of these solutions are too web-centric. It needs have a fine balance between on-the-web and off-the-web linkage.

To me, consumers need to have the flexibility to join an information exchange where their membership entitles them to open or close their privacy information as they need it for that context. It must be their prerogative to build a world of links ( what ever they do - on the web and off-the-web) that is available, to the information exchange, as this will enable consumers to reach out to advertisers rather than the other way around. These are consumer info-banks that are owned and managed by consumers themselves.

Customer conversations in a world without identities

I recently read a very thought provoking article by Alec - " Hankering for a world without identity or federation". Also, a lovely follow-up article on the same topic by Andriana. Also, there's a nice comment by Christopher Carfi on the same topic.

These articles raised serious questions in my mind about how marketers, in the future, will have to build conversations with customers without identity. The key issue raised in my head was - increasingly as more and more get customers get online or mobile( in developing markets like India, China and the like) they would like to control their identity & conversations with brands. I presume things like DNPC( Do Not Place Cookies), DNL( Do not link ads(without permission)), DNT(Do Not tag along - SMSs )etc. will increasingly gain importance.

At the same time , these mediums are also being used for transactions and  purchases more and more. Many of these articles talk about protecting identity but when you combine identity with transactional information, interests in various social networks,memberships in certain sites etc.- it provides a new dimension in building conversations  with customers.Marketers will need to use data from multiple sources -in real time- to understand customers, get into their inner circle by really being valuable to their lives not just providing or sending a marketing messages. Also, identities need to be confirmed from multiple sources of paths from where customers come. There is a nice diagram from Adriana that I have picked-up which brings this point alive:
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The key challenges and the winners of tomorrow will be the ones who are able to build conversations without identities.