Right Side Up

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.

Tweet This Post

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

Tweet This Post

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

Tweet This Post

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

Tweet This Post

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

Tweet This Post

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

Tweet This Post

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

Tweet This Post

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

Tweet This Post

AlanMitchell Buyer centric services, Data, Project VRM, vpi

Two  welcome bits of news this week from the UK.

First, BT has distanced itself from Phorm, the behavioural targeting advertising company that stalks individuals’ usage of internet sites to deliver more ‘relevant’ advertising to them.

In one sense, there is nothing wrong with the idea of building a profile of an individual’s web-surfing habits and using that information to serve up relevant information. Where Phorm went wrong was that it tried to do it behind individuals’ backs, without their knowledge or permission.

Now. Turn the Phorm proposition on its head, so that individuals use exactly the same technology to build up a profile of their own activities, and are then able to bundle bits of the profile into packages (‘this is the research I have done for my new holiday’, ‘this is the research I have for my new car’) and to selectively disclose this information to organisations they want to do business with and trust.

Hey presto! All of Phorm’s privacy invasion issues disappear as the technology becomes a tool of consumer empowerment. And advertisers actually get much better value from it!

When, oh when, will marketers and advertisers see that their current adversarial, targeting mindset is precisely why their initiatives are so inefficient, ineffective and (as with Phorm) counterproductive?

The second bit of news is the Tories’ announcement that they might turn to companies like Google or Microsoft to help build personal health records, as opposed to the current approach of centralised NHS (i.e. organisation-centric) medical records that has been a dismal failure and cost the citizens of this country £18bn so far.

As the Tories are likely to be the next government, this is significant, which is why The Times carried a lead front page story on it. Unfortunately, The Times got the wrong end of the stick (they are still working to an old and out of date political agenda). The issue is not who holds the data – state organisations or private sector organisations – but who controls the data: individual or organisation.

The Tories have woken up to what Phorm hasn’t – The Times reports a Tory spokesman talking about the need for people to ‘own’ their own data. Is Google or Microsoft the right organisation to facilitate this?  Not in my view, but then I’m biased because of my involvement with Mydex whose mission in life is to help individuals do exactly that.

But the key point is this. It’s now becoming clear that the issue of helping individuals ‘own’ and manage their own information is moving rapidly from the ‘far out’ fringe to the mainstream.

About time too!

Alan Mitchell

Tweet This Post

AlanMitchell 'The Information Age', Data, Marketing, Privacy, vpi

The British Standards Institute have produced a new set of standards for what they call PIMS (Personal Information Management Systems).

Of course, this PIMS is the complete opposite of the PIMS we have been talking about for the last couple of years. Their standard is for organisations managing individuals’ personal data. Our PIMS are for individuals using information to manage their affairs.

‘My PIMS’ versus ‘Their PIMS’. Oh dear, more terminological confusion here we come!

Tweet This Post

AlanMitchell Buyer centric services, Resources and Papers