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For about ten years now I’ve been banging on about buyer-centricity – the concept of a business that exists to work for and on behalf of the individual, helping the individual manage his or her relationship with the world out there, including organisations.

For a long time now, I’ve been working with Iain Henderson and others, including William Heath and David Alexander, to make this vision a reality.

Next week we announce publicly a test of the first working prototype of such a service: The Personal Data Store.

In preparation for this launch, we have published a White Paper (http://bit.ly/b1jvGN) which explores the concept in depth: what it does, how it works, what its implications are. I would be really interested in your comments.

PS: This is what the Press Release says:

30th September 2010

PRESS RELEASE

“The case for Personal Information Empowerment” –

Mydex publishes groundbreaking White Paper
Imagine a world where:

• Instead of signing companies’ terms and conditions and agreeing to their privacy policies every time you do business with them, they sign yours.

• Instead of people spamming you with messages, you choose who communicates with you about what, when – and can turn these communications on and off at will.

• You have much greater visibility and control over what organisations are doing with your personal information.

• You don’t have to remember a different password every time you log on to an Internet site.

• Instead of being tracked and monitored wherever you go online (or offline     for that matter), you collect your own data about yourself which companies pay to access.

• When you’ve got a complicated online form, you can fill it in almost automatically (and safely and securely) with just a few clicks, and automatically save a copy for your own records.

• When you move home or make other changes in your life, you don’t have to phone up or go online with dozens of different organisations jumping through their hoops set up for their convenience. Instead, you can tell them all at one go, simply by registering this change in your own personal database.

• Where governments and organisations can cut the cost of managing data and privacy protection whilst increasing security, efficiency and quality of service to individuals through a controlled exchange of information.

This is Mydex’s vision of the world outlined in its new White Paper: The Case for Personal Information Empowerment – The rise of the personal data store.

In the White Paper, Mydex * proposes that a fundamental shift in personal information management –  where individuals ‘own’ and manage their own personal data – transforms relationships between individuals and organisations with significant benefits for both sides. It is also the catalyst of an entirely new business and service eco-system of personal information management services.

The White Paper provides the context and ‘big picture’ for a unique live service – the Personal Data Store – which will shortly be trialled.

The Mydex service:

• helps people regain control of their personal data – so that they only share it with other people and organisations when they want to and how they want to.

• helps individuals turn their personal data into a personal asset which supports them in managing their lives better and which also saves them time and hassle and may even earn them a bit of extra cash

• uses next-gen internet technologies that transform users’ online experience (say goodbye to passwords, log-ins and cookies, for a start).

ENDS/

http://bit.ly/b1jvGN Mydex     White Paper: The Case for Personal Information Empowerment:                 The rise of the personal data store

* Mydex is incorporated as a Community Interest Company, which means that it is designed as a social enterprise that wants to use its profits and assets for the public good. Mydex’s social purpose is “to help individuals realise the value of their personal data”.

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AlanMitchell 'The Information Age', Buyer centric services, Data, Privacy, vpi

Whenever marketers use the word ‘customer’ or ‘consumer’ they bury themselves deep within an organisation-centric view of the world: these terms are seller-centric inventions.

The only entities that see ‘customers’ or ‘consumers’ when they look at the world are organisations trying to sell stuff. When marketers talk about customers and consumers, they are not talking about the world ‘out there’ as it really exists, they are looking into a mirror reflecting their own internal obsessions back to them.

A customer is someone who buys what we sell. When the organisation looks at ‘the customer’ it is just looking at ‘what we sell’ from a slightly different perspective, a perspective designed to help it sell better. There is nothing wrong with this per se. There is lots to be said for it. But it is a seller-centric projection. You can spend an entire lifetime peering into this mirror without ever seeing what lies beyond.

One way of looking beyond this mirror is to recognise that every product or service that meets a need – i.e. that’s sold – also generates a new need: the need to make a decision.

In the industrial age, meeting this meta-need – the need to make better decisions (and to implement them better) – wasn’t the seller/marketer’s job. There was a division of labour. The job of the organisation was to make a good product. The job of the ‘consumer’ was to make a decision – a choice. And the job of the marketer was to influence these decisions.

This was probably inevitable at the time. Decision-making is an information intensive task and gathering and using information in an organised way was prohibitively expensive.

A tectonic shift

But today that’s changing and we can look at the world through a different lens – that of the decision-maker (the person) rather than that of the decision-influencer (the seller). Once you do this it quickly becomes apparent that this meta-need – to make (and implement) better decisions – is bigger than all other needs (for chocolates, for cars, for current accounts etc) because it embraces them all, subsuming them into the bigger task of achieving what the person (not the seller) wants to achieve.

Person- or buyer-centric services then, sit on the side of the individual, helping the individual achieve what the individual wants to achieve, including managing relationships with many different suppliers more efficiently and more effectively (VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management). The central questions here are, What challenges does the person face when doing this? How to do it better?

The difference between now and say, twenty years ago, is that twenty years ago this person-centric perspective was operationally irrelevant. You couldn’t do anything practical to help people address these challenges. When marketers said ‘the customer is king’, it was just a disguised way of saying ‘the organisation is king’.

Now, however, as information becomes a tool in the hands of the individual, that’s changing. The organisational king is being deposed. This is not about superficial changes in ‘how to achieve the same old marketing goals better’. For example, it’s got nothing to do with arguments about whether it’s easier, cheaper or better to get marketing messages across via social media or mass advertising. It’s a deep, structural, tectonic, remorseless and comprehensive transformation in the relationship between individuals and organisations.

And if you keep on looking in the customer mirror, you simply won’t see it coming.

Alan Mitchell

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AlanMitchell 'The Information Age', Buyer centric services, Project VRM

This week the UK’s main political parties published their manifestos for the current general election.

The Tories, who are currently tipped to win, have included this sentence in their manifesto:

“Wherever possible we believe that personal data should be controlled by individual citizens themselves”.

The ruling Labour Party has included this promise in their manifesto:

“We will explore how to give citizens direct access to the data held on them by public agencies, so that people can use and control their own personal data in their interaction with service providers and the wider community.”

Of course we all know about politicians and election promises, but policy-wise this is a momentous breakthrough. It shows that in some pivotally important circles, the arguments for the old organisation-centric ways of dealing with personal/customer data have been lost and that a new, much more person-centric approach has been recognised as the way forward.

There are many ways this could go horribly wrong and we will have to work hard to make sure they don’t. But either way, this a momentous breakthrough – a decisive departure from the direction we have been travelling for the past 40-50 years.

It’s evidence that the person-centric paradigm is truly taking hold.

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AlanMitchell 'The Information Age', Data, Project VRM, vpi

Last night, eloquently supported by my colleague William Heath, I gave a master class on Volunteered Personal Information for the IDM (Institute of Direct Marketing).

My concluding summary was:

•    We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century tipping point in the information flows in our society: from ‘top down’ (organisation to individual) to ‘bottom up’ (individuals to organisations and each other).
•    Marketing as we know it was constructed around the assumptions and operational requirements of ‘top down’.
•    Most of its current problems and constraints are a by-product of this heritage.
•    In the course of organising and managing their daily lives – making and implementing decisions – individuals generate huge amounts of new, rich, accurate, timely information about who they are and what they want..
•    An emerging industry of Personal Information Management Services (PIMS) is making it possible for individuals to capture and share this information.
•    For this information to be shared on a mass scale however, three new ‘rules’ of personal data must be accepted: personal information is the person’s; the individual must have control over what information is shared with who, for what purposes; the individual has to derive a genuine benefit from the information sharing process.
•    Once these rules have been accepted, multiple different types of VPI will begin to flow.
•    Separately and together this VPI can help organisations cut guesswork, waste and costs, identify customer needs better and focus available resources on truly adding value: a ‘VPI value explosion’.
•    Every organisation needs to develop its own VPI strategy.

If you want to find out more, get in touch with me at Alan.Mitchell@ctrl-shift.co.uk and I will send you a shortened version of my presentation.

Alan Mitchell

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AlanMitchell 'The Information Age', Buyer centric services, Uncategorized, vpi

I’ve just been revisiting a debate which flared up a couple of years ago and which seems to be returning: are we moving towards an attention economy or, perhaps an intention economy?

Thinking about it, I don’t think we are moving towards either because they are both sub-sets of something much bigger. When push comes to shove, economies are organised around human beings’ physiological, psychological and social needs and wants. How we address these needs and wants changes over time and this is driven by decisions: we achieve our goals by making better decisions, and implementing these decisions better.

Call it MAIDB for short: Making and Implementing Decisions Better.

Ultimately, that’s what people want to do. But doing it is very difficult. And understanding how to do it better seems to be even more difficult.

The more I look at this, the bigger it gets.

Alan Mitchell

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AlanMitchell Uncategorized

‘Customer Relationship Management’ (CRM) can never deliver its hoped-for benefits because it’s constrained by a series of intrinsic flaws. The emerging alternative for organisations is to rely less on data collected about customers behind their backs and outside of their control, and to rely more of data volunteered by customers under their control.

Of course, this requires all sorts of changes in attitudes, processes, mechanisms, even business models. But my prediction is very simple. Over the coming five to ten years, organisations that get up to speed on this have a good chance of prospering. And those that fail to ‘get it’ will be left behind, hamstrung by two pretty damaging weaknesses: reduced ability to deliver customer value, and reduced customer trust.

I’ve written more about this for MyCustomer.com here.

The research on which this article is based is here.

Alan Mitchell

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AlanMitchell 'The Information Age', vpi

At the core of the buyer-centric concept is the simple notion that for most people, value boils down to the ability to make and implement better decisions – at every level from life defining to choice of toothpaste.

Trouble is, once we start investigating what a ‘better decision’ might look like, it turns out to be pretty complicated.  New discoveries in psychology are underlining just how complicated human decision-making is, and the whole debate has been shrouded in a fog of confusion – most of it generated by marketers and their self-serving theories of ‘persuasion’.

Anyway, I’ve been gnawing away at these issues over the past few months and will at the grindstone for a while yet.

If you are interested in some half-way house conclusions, you can see my summary of what new findings of psychology mean for our understanding of consumer decision here, and why most marketing theories about consumer decision-making are so much claptrap here.

Really keen to hear any thoughts or comments.

Alan Mitchell

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AlanMitchell Buyer centric services, Marketing, The Persuasion Paradigm

Doc Searls has circulated a brilliant picture of some clever people’s view of the music industry. You can see it at http://www.sloaneandco.com/images/universe_of_music.jpg.

In case you didn’t notice, just one music industry player is missing. Can you guess which?

Alan Mitchell

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AlanMitchell Uncategorized

I’ve written an article on Volunteered Personal Information. You can read it at http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/news/926139/Reinventing-marketing-Alan-Mitchell-asks-marketers-prepared-era-volunteered-personal-information/

Alan Mitchell

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AlanMitchell 'The Information Age', Project VRM, vpi

One of the things that falls out our analysis of personal data ecosystems is the power of ‘volunteered personal information’ (VPI).  This is information that only the individual knows or can see because of his or her unique vantage point, and which (therefore) only that individual can share.

This creates many knock-on questions.

One of them is ‘how valuable/important is this information?’. Answer: unthinkably valuable, because potentially this volunteered information tells us (i.e. suppliers, governments, public services, other individuals) who somebody is, what they want and need, and when they need it. The ‘holy grail’ of information about the nature, shape, location and timing of demand, in other words. The new report from Ctrl-Shift on this subject estimates that within ten years, the market value of VPI ‘feeds’ from individuals to organisations will be worth £20bn in the UK alone.

Other questions follow, such as:

• ‘what are the mechanisms by which individuals are going to capture, gather, store and share this information?’
• ‘under what conditions will they do so? e.g. what are the incentives encouraging people to participate and what are the obstacles discouraging them?’
• ‘what are the rules surrounding such information sharing? This includes technical standards, enabling information to flow easily, but also terms and conditions as to who has access to this VPI, for what purposes, under what terms?’

These are all huge questions, which many people are working on right now (see, Project VRM, Mydex and the Kantara Initiative for example).  I’ve blogged about some of the issues surrounding VPI here.

Alan Mitchell

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AlanMitchell Buyer centric services, Data, Project VRM, vpi