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
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