Category: VRM+CRM (Page 2 of 11)

Market intelligence that flows both ways

July 11, 2025 / / 15 Comments

Look up customer journey or customer experience (aka CX) and you’ll find nothing about what the customer drives, or rides. All results will be for systems meant for herding customers like cattle into a chute that the CX business (no kidding) calls a sales funnel:

Do any customers want to go down these drains?

But let’s stick with the journey metaphor, because there are good people in the marketing business who have thought deeply about how people buy and own things. Chief among those people is Estaban Kolsky, of Constellation Research. He visualizes the journey in a way that not only gives weight to the ownership experience, but separates it from the sales experience :

As for our actual experience, we spend 100 percent of our lives with things we own, and just a tiny percentage on buying them. So the real ratio should look more like this:

And yet, as I pointed out several years back in Turning the Customer Journey Into a Virtuous Cycle…

…consider the curb weight of “solutions” in the world of interactivity between company and customer today. In the BUY loop of the customer journey, we have:

1. All of advertising, which Magna Global expects to pass $.5 trillion, more than a decade ago

2. All of CRM/CX, which now exceeds $100 billion

3. All the rest of marketing, which has too many segments for me to bother looking up

So, in the OWN loop we have a $0 trillion greenfield.

To enter that greenfield, we need customers to be in charge of their side of these relationships— preferably through means for interaction that customers themselves control—on terms that are agreeable to both sides, rather than the one-sided terms we suffer every time we click AGREE on a cookie notice.

To help imagine how that will work, I volunteer a real-world example from my own life.

A few years back, I bought a pair of LAMO Mens Mocs at a shopping mall kiosk in Massachusetts. Here’s one:

I like them a lot. They’re very comfortable and warm on winter mornings. In fact I still wear them, even though the soles have long since come apart and fallen off. Here is how they looked after a few years of use:

I’m showing this so you, and LAMO, can see what happens, and how we can both use my experience—and those of other customers—to change the world.

See, I like LAMO, and would love to help the company learn from my experience with one of their products. As of today, there are four choices for that:

  1. Do nothing (that’s the default)
  2. Send them an email
  3. Go on some website and talk about it. (A perfect Leighton cartoon in the  New Yorker shows a couple registering at a hotel while the person behind the counter says, “If there’s anything we can do to make your stay more pleasant, just rant about it on the Internet.”)
  4. Get “social” by tweeting to @LAMOfootwear or posting to LAMO’s Facebook page. (For wisdom on “social” relations between brands and presumed fans, see Bob Hoffman‘s talk on the topic.)

So here is a fifth choice: give these moccasins their own virtual cloud, where LAMO and I can share intelligence about whatever we like, starting (on my side) with reports on my own experience, requests for service, or whatever. Phil Windley calls these clouds picos, for persistent compute objects. Picos are breeds of what Bruce Sterling calls spime: persistent intelligence for things. Picos have their own operating system (e.g., Wrangler, which Phil most recently posted about here), and don’t need intelligence on board. Just scan a QR code, and you’ll get to the pico. Here’s the QR code on one of my LAMO moccasins:

Go ahead and scan the code with your phone. You’ll get to a page that says it’s my moccasin.

That’s just one view of a potential relationship between me and Lamo — one in which I can put a message that says “If found, call or text _______.” Another view is on my own dashboard of things in my OWN cycle, and direct connections to every one of those companies. That relationship can rest on friendly terms in which I’m the first party and the company is the second party. (For more on that, see here and here.)

So look at the relationship between me and Lamo as a conduit (the blue cylinder below) that lives in the pico for my mocassin. That conduit goes from my VRM (vendor relationship management) dashboard to Lamo’s CRM (customer relationship management) system. There is no limit to the goodness that can pass back and forth between us, including intelligence about how I use my moccasins.

Let’s look at what can happen at either or both ends of that conduit.

A pico for a product is a CRM dream come true: a standard way for every copy of every product to have its own unique identity and virtual cloud (in which any data can live), and standard way any customer can report usage and other intelligence about any product they own—without any smarts needing to live on the thing itself.

If I scan that QR code, I can see whatever notes I’ve taken. I can also see whatever LAMO has put in there, with my permission. Also in that cloud is whatever programming has been done on it. Here is one example of simple relationship logic at work:

IF this QR code is scanned, THEN send LAMO a note that Doc has a new entry in our common journal.

Likewise, LAMO can send me a note saying that there is new information in the same journal. Maybe that information is a note telling me that the company has changed sole manufacturers, and that the newest Mens Mocs will be far more durable. Or maybe they’ll send a discount on a new pair. The correct answer for what goes in the common journal (a term I just made up) is: whatever.

Now let’s say LAMO puts a different QR code, or other identifier, in every moccasin it sells. Or has a CRM system that is alert to notifications from customers who have turned their LAMO moccasins into picos, making all those moccasins smart. LAMO can then not only keep up with its customers through CRM-VRM conduits, but tie interactions through those conduits to the dashboards of their accounting systems (from Xero or other companies that provide enriched views of how the company is interacting with the world).

This is one huge potential key to the future of customer service, customer relationship management (CRM), call centers, loyalty programs, continuous improvement, customer experience (CX), customer engagement (CE) and other complicated ways businesses today try to solve all relationship problems from the maker’s or the seller’s side alone.

Follow the links in the last paragraph (all to Wikipedia), and you’ll find each of them has “multiple issues.” The reason for that is simple: the customer is not involved with any of them. All those entries make the sound of industries talking to themselves — or one hand slapping.

This is an old problem that can only be fixed on the customer’s side. Before the Internet, solving things from the customer’s side — by making the customer the point of integration for her own data, and the decider about what gets done with that data — was impossible. Now that we have the Internet, it’s very possible, but only if we get our heads out of business-as-usual and back into our own lives. This will be good for business as well.

A while back I had meetings with two call center companies, and reviewed this scenario:

  1. A customer scans the QR code on her cable modem, activating its pico.
  2. By the logic described above, a message to the call center says “This customer has scanned the QR code on her cable modem.”
  3. The call center checks to see if there is an outage in the customer’s area, and — if there is — finds out how soon it will be fixed.
  4. The call center sends a message back saying there’s an outage and that it will be fixed within X hours.

In both cases, the call center company sai,d “We want that!” Because they really do want to be fully useful. And — get this — they are programmable.

Unfortunately, in too many cases, they are programmed to avoid customers or to treat them as templates rather than as individual human beings who might actually be able to provide useful information. This is old-fashioned mass-marketing thinking at work, and it sucks for everybody. It’s especially bad at delivering (literal) on-the-ground market intelligence from customers to companies.

Call centers would rather be sources of real solutions rather than just customer avoidance machines for companies and anger sinks for unhappy customers. The solution I’m talking about here takes care of that. And much more.

Now let’s go back to shoes.

I’m not a hugely brand-loyal kind of guy. I use Canon cameras because I like the long-standing 5D user interface more than the competing Nikon ones, and Canon’s lens prices tend to be lower. I use Apple computers because they’re easy to get fixed and I can open a command line shell and get geeky when I need to. I drive a 2017 VW wagon because I got it at a good price. And I buy Rockport shoes because, on the whole, they’re pretty good.

Used to be they were great. That was in the ’70s and early ’80s when Saul and Bruce Katz, the founders, were still in charge. That legacy is still there, under Reebok ownership; but it’s clear that the company is much more of a mass marketing operation than it was back in the early days. Still, in my experience, they’re better than the competition. That’s why I buy their shoes. Rockports are the only shoes I’ve ever loved. And I’ve had many.

So here is a photo I took of wear-and-tear on two pairs of Rockport casual shoes I still use, because they’re damned comfortable:

Shots 1 and 2 are shoes I bought in June 2012, and are no longer sold, near as I can tell. (Wish they were.) Shots 3 and 4 are of shoes called Off The Coast 2 Eye. I bought mine in late 2013, but didn’t start wearing them a lot until early this year. I bought both at the Rockport store in Burlington Mall, near Boston. I like that store too.

The first pair has developed a hole in the heel and loose eyelet grommets for the laces around the side of the shoe. The hole isn’t a big deal, except that it lets in water. The loose eyelets are only a bother when I cross my feet sitting down: they bite into the other ankle. The separating outer sole of the second pair is a bigger concern, because these shoes are still essentially new, and look new except for that one flaw. A design issue is the leather laces, which need to be double-knotted to keep from coming undone, and even the double-knots come undone as well. That’s a quibble, but perhaps useful for Rockport to know.

I’d like to share these experiences privately with Rockport, and for that process to be easy. Same with my experiences with LAMO moccasins.

It could be private if Rockport and LAMO footwear came with QR codes for every pair’s pico — it’s own cloud. Or if Rockport’s CRM or call center system was programmed to hear pings from my picos.

Ideally, customers would get the pico along with the shoe. Then they would have their own shared journal and message space — the conduit shown above — as well as a programmable system for creating and improving the whole customer-company relationship. They could also get social about their dialogs in their own ways, rather than only within Facebook and Twitter, which are the least private and personal places imaginable.

This kind of intelligence exchange can only become a standard way for companies and customers to learn from each other if the code for picos is open source. If Rockport or LAMO try to “own the customer” by locking her into a closed company-controlled system — the current default for customer service — the Internet of Things will be what Phil calls “the Compuserve of things”. In other words, divided into the same kind of closed and incompatible systems we had before the Net came along.

One big thing that made the Internet succeed was substitutability of services. Cars, banks, and countless other product categories you can name are large and vital because open and well-understood standards and practices at their base have made substitutability possible. Phil says we can’t have a true Internet of Things without it, and I agree.

The smartest people working for companies are their customers. And the best way to activate customer smarts is by giving them scale. That’s what picos do.

As a bonus, they also give companies scale. If we can standardize picos, we’ll have common and standard ways for any customer and any company to relate to each other through any VRM + CRM system. Think about how much more, and better, intelligence a company can get from its customers this way, rather than through the ones barely succeeding now, where the company does all the work, and fails to know an infinitude of useful stuff customers could be telling them. Think about how much more products can be improved, an iterated over time. Think about how much more genuine loyalty can be created and sustained with this kind of two-way system.

Then think how much companies can save by not constantly spying on customers, guessing about what they might want, spamming them with unwanted and unnecessary sales messages, maintaining systems try to relate but actually can’t, and herding customers into imaginary funnels that customers would loathe if they could see what’s going on.

It’s a lot.

So let’s start working on growing a sane world of business that’s based on market intelligence that flows both ways, instead of the surveillance-based guesswork and delusional imaginings of marketing that smokes its own exhaust. We can do it, privately, and at scale.

The first ancestor of this post appeared at ProjectVRM on 19 Apri 2014. It was updated a bit on 8 June 2017. The second one was posted here on Medium in 2016. With IEEE P7012, aka MyTerms nearing completion, there is a good chance we can make this dream come true in 2026.

The MyTerms PAR

April 6, 2025 / / 14 Comments

With MyTerms, the person (and their electronic agent) is the first party, and the corporate entity (with its agent) is the second party. This is essential for assuring full respect for personal privacy in the digital world.

Every IEEE standard starts with a PAR: a Project Authorization Request.

Here is the PAR for EEE P7012 (nicknamed MyTerms—much as IEEE 802.11 is nicknamed Wi-Fi). It launched a working group in 2017 (that I now chair), and is expected to go from draft to done by early 2026.

Because what the standard will do is plainly laid out in the PAR, I’m breaking its paragraph into separate sentences to make reading it easier:

This draft standard covers contractual interactions and agreements between individuals and the service providers they engage on a network, including websites.

It describes how individuals, acting as first parties, can proffer their privacy requirements as contractual terms and arrive at agreements recorded and kept by both sides.

These terms shall be chosen from a collection of standard-form agreements in a roster kept by an independent and neutral non-business entity.

Computing devices and software performing as agents for both first and second parties shall engage using any protocol that serves the purpose.

The first party shall point to a preferred agreement, or a set of agreements, from which the second party shall accept one.

Party-to-party negotiations over terms in any of these contracts or other agreements are outside the scope of this standard. If both parties agree, the chosen contract or agreement shall be signed electronically by both parties or their agents.

A matching record shall be kept by both sides in a form that can be retrieved, audited, or disputed, if necessary, at some later time–and which is available to do so easily.*

I can’t share the draft before the final version is published, but I can say that what it says is about as simple as what you read above. It also does not specify what tech or protocol to use. This is to leave development as open as possible.

The main thing is that MyTerms obsolesces notice-and-consent by basing privacy agreements on contracts that individuals proffer as first parties, and sites and services agree to as second parties.

Never mind that this hardly seems thinkable to the status quo. The same was once said of the Internet, the Web, email, and other free and open graces we take for granted today.

Putting each of us in charge of our privacy online is what makes MyTerms the most important standard in development today. But only if we make it so.

If you want to get involved, help us build out Customer Commons, so it can play the same role for personal privacy terms that Creative Commons plays for personal copyright.

*Shall is  IEEE-speak for will or must. The purpose of that rule is to make clear that it does not mean should, could, or any other modal auxiliary verb.

On Customer Constituency

March 4, 2024 / / 1 Comment

A customer looks at a market where choice rules and nobody owns anybody. Source: Microsoft Copilot | Designer

I’m in a discussion of business constituencies. On the list (sourced from the writings of Doug Shapiro) are investors, employees, suppliers, customers, and regulators.

The first three are aware of their membership, but the last two? Not so sure.

Since ProjectVRM works for customers, let’s spin the question around. Do customers have a business constituency? If so, businesses are members by the customer’s grace. She can favor, ignore, or more deeply engage with any of those businesses at her pleasure. She does not “belong” to any of them, even though any or all of them may refer to her, or their many other customers, with possessive pronouns.

Take membership (e.g. Costco, Sam’s Club) and loyalty (CVS, Kroger) programs off the table. Membership systems are private markets, and loyalty programs are misnomered. (For more about that, read the “Dysloyalty” chapter of The Intention Economy.)

Let’s look instead at businesses that customers engage as a matter of course: contractors, medical doctors, auto mechanics, retail stores, restaurants, clubs, farmers’ markets, whatever. Some may be on speed dial, but most are not. What matters in all cases is that these businesses are responsible to their customers. “The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers,” Adam Smith writes. “It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence.” That’s what it means to be a customer’s constituent.

An early promise of the Internet was supporting that “effectual discipline.” For the most part, that hasn’t happened. The “one clue” in The Cluetrain Manifesto said “we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.” Thanks to ubiquitous surveillance and capture by corporate giants and unavoidable platforms, corporate grasp far outreaches customer agency.

That’s one reason ProjectVRM has been working against corporate grasp since 2006, and just as long for customer reach. Our case from the start has been that customer independence and agency are good for business. We just need to prove it.

ProjectVRM 2.0

August 18, 2023 / / 0 Comments

It took a while, but our website is now on its own. Big thanks go to the Berkman Klein Center for hosting us on its blog server since 2006. Also for continuing to host our mailing list and our wiki. And to all the friends who helped, including those at WordPress and Pressable, who made the transition smooth and complete. Links to every post and page we’ve published at blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/ (our old location) now travel down the same directory paths at projectvrm.org/. There will be no 404s. This is a rare thing for any site that moves from one host to another.

Clearly, this is not the one-year project we imagined in the first place. It may not be a one-generation project. But we will get from the state on the left above to the one on the right. And thanks to Gapingvoid‘s Hugh MacLeod for drawing that illustration in the first place, way back in 2005.

 

Toward a lexicon for advertising in both directions

June 9, 2022 / / 0 Comments

We need a lexicon for the different ways buyers and sellers express their intentions to each other. Or, one might say, advertise.

On the demand side (⊂) we have what in ProjectVRM we’ve called intentcasting and (earlier) personal RFP. Scott Adams calls it broadcast shopping and John Hagel and David Siegel both (in books by that title) call it pull.

On the sell side (⊃) I can list at least six kinds of advertising alone that desperately need distinctive labels. To pull them apart, these are:

  1. Brand advertising. This kind is aimed at populations. All of it is contextual, meaning placed in media, TV or radio programs, or publications, that appeal broadly or narrowly to a categorized audience. None of it is tracking-based, and none of it is personal. Little of it wants a direct response. It simply means to impress. This is also the form of advertising that burned every brand you can name into your brain. In fact the word brand itself was borrowed from the cattle industry by Procter & Gamble in the 1930s, when it also funded the golden age of radio. Today it is also what sponsors all of sports broadcasting and pays most sports stars their massive salaries.
  2. Search advertising. This is what shows up with search results. There are two very different kinds here:
    1. Context-based. Not based on tracking. This is what DuckDuckGo does.
    2. Context+tracking based. This is what Google and Bing do.
  3. Tracking-based advertising. I’ve called this adtech. Cory Doctorow calls it ad-tech. Others call it ad tech. Some euphemize it as behavioral, relevant, interest-based, or personalized. Shoshana Zuboff says all of them are based on surveillance, which they are. So many critics speak of it as surveillance-based advertising.
  4. Advertising that’s both contextual and personal—but only in the sense that a highly characterized individual falls within a group, or a collection of overlapping groups, chosen by the advertiser. These are Facebook’s Core, Custom and Look-Alike audiences. Talk to Facebook and they’ll tell you these ads are not meant to be personal, though you should not be surprised to see ads for shoes when you have made clear to Facebook’s trackers (on the site, the apps, and wherever the company’s tentacles reach) that you might be in the market for shoes. Still, since Facebook characterizes every face in its audience in almost countless ways, it’s easy to call this form of advertising tracking-based.
  5. Interactive advertising. Vaguely defined by Wikipedia here,  and sometimes called conversational advertising,  the purpose is to get an interactive response from people. The expression is not much used today, even though the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is the leading trade association in the tracking-based advertising field and its primary proponent.
  6. Native advertising, also called sponsored content, is advertising made to look like ordinary editorial material.

The list is actually much longer. But the distinction that matters is between advertising that is tracking-based and the advertising that is not. As I put it in Brands need to fire adtech,

Let’s be clear about all the differences between adtech and real advertising. It’s adtech that spies on people and violates their privacy. It’s adtech that’s full of fraud and a vector for malware. It’s adtech that incentivizes publications to prioritize “content generation” over journalism. It’s adtech that gives fake news a business model, because fake news is easier to produce than the real kind, and adtech will pay anybody a bounty for hauling in eyeballs.

Real advertising doesn’t do any of those things, because it’s not personal. It is aimed at populations selected by the media they choose to watch, listen to or read. To reach those people with real ads, you buy space or time on those media. You sponsor those media because those media also have brand value.

With real advertising, you have brands supporting brands.

Brands can’t sponsor media through adtech because adtech isn’t built for that. On the contrary, adtech is built to undermine the brand value of all the media it uses, because it cares about eyeballs more than media.

Adtech is magic in this literal sense: it’s all about misdirection. You think you’re getting one thing while you’re really getting another. It’s why brands think they’re placing ads in media, while the systems they hire chase eyeballs. Since adtech systems are automated and biased toward finding the cheapest ways to hit sought-after eyeballs with ads, some ads show up on unsavory sites. And, let’s face it, even good eyeballs go to bad places.

This is why the media, the UK government, the brands, and even Google are all shocked. They all think adtech is advertising. Which makes sense: it looks like advertising and gets called advertising. But it is profoundly different in almost every other respect. I explain those differences in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff:

…advertising today is also digital. That fact makes advertising much more data-driven, tracking-based and personal. Nearly all the buzz and science in advertising today flies around the data-driven, tracking-based stuff generally called adtech. This form of digital advertising has turned into a massive industry, driven by an assumption that the best advertising is also the most targeted, the most real-time, the most data-driven, the most personal — and that old-fashioned brand advertising is hopelessly retro.

In terms of actual value to the marketplace, however, the old-fashioned stuff is wheat and the new-fashioned stuff is chaff. In fact, the chaff was only grafted on recently.

See, adtech did not spring from the loins of Madison Avenue. Instead its direct ancestor is what’s called direct response marketing. Before that, it was called direct mail, or junk mail. In metrics, methods and manners, it is little different from its closest relative, spam.

Direct response marketing has always wanted to get personal, has always been data-driven, has never attracted the creative talent for which Madison Avenue has been rightly famous. Look up best ads of all time and you’ll find nothing but wheat. No direct response or adtech postings, mailings or ad placements on phones or websites.

Yes, brand advertising has always been data-driven too, but the data that mattered was how many people were exposed to an ad, not how many clicked on one — or whether you, personally, did anything.

And yes, a lot of brand advertising is annoying. But at least we know it pays for the TV programs we watch and the publications we read. Wheat-producing advertisers are called “sponsors” for a reason.

So how did direct response marketing get to be called advertising ? By looking the same. Online it’s hard to tell the difference between a wheat ad and a chaff one.

Remember the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers?” (Or the remake by the same name?) Same thing here. Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.

This whole problem wouldn’t exist if the alien replica wasn’t chasing spied-on eyeballs, and if advertisers still sponsored desirable media the old-fashioned way.

Bonus link.

I wrote that in 2017. The GDPR became enforceable in 2018 and the CCPA in 2020.  Today more laws and regulations are being instituted to fight tracking-based advertising, yet the whole advertising industry remains drunk on digital, deeply corrupt and delusional, and growing like a Stage IV cancer.

We live digital lives now, and most of the advertising we see and hear is on or through glowing digital rectangles. Most of those are personal as well. So, naturally, most advertising on those media is personal—or wishes it was. Regulations that require “consent” for the tracking that personalization requires do not make the practice less hostile to personal privacy. They just make the whole mess easier to rationalize.

So I’m trying to do two things here.

One is to make clearer the distinctions between real advertising and direct marketing.

The other is to suggest that better signaling from demand to supply, starting with intentcasting, may serve as chemo for the cancer that adtech has become. It will do that by simply making clear to sellers what buyers actually want and don’t want.

 

 

The Rise of Robot Retail

March 1, 2022 / / 1 Comment

end of personal dealings
From Here Comes the Full Amazonification of Whole Foods, by Cecelia Kang (@CeceliaKang) in The New York Times:

…In less than a minute, I scanned both hands on a kiosk and linked them to my Amazon account. Then I hovered my right palm over the turnstile reader to enter the nation’s most technologically sophisticated grocery store…

Amazon designed my local grocer to be almost completely run by tracking and robotic tools for the first time.

The technology, known as Just Walk Out, consists of hundreds of cameras with a god’s-eye view of customers. Sensors are placed under each apple, carton of oatmeal and boule of multigrain bread. Behind the scenes, deep-learning software analyzes the shopping activity to detect patterns and increase the accuracy of its charges.

The technology is comparable to what’s in driverless cars. It identifies when we lift a product from a shelf, freezer or produce bin; automatically itemizes the goods; and charges us when we leave the store. Anyone with an Amazon account, not just Prime members, can shop this way and skip a cash register since the bill shows up in our Amazon account.

And this is just Amazon. Soon it will be every major vendor of everything, most likely with Amazon as the alpha sphincter among all the chokepoints controlled by robotic intermediaries between first sources and final customers—with all of them customizing your choices, your prices, and whatever else it takes to engineer demand in the marketplace—algorithmically, robotically, and most of all, personally.

Some of us will like it, because it’ll be smooth, easy and relatively cheap. It will also subordinate us utterly to machines. Or perhaps udderly, because we will be calves raised to suckle on the teats of retail’s robot cows.

This system can’t be fixed from within. Nor can it be fixed by regulation, though some of that might help. It can only be obsolesced by customers who bring more to the market’s table than cash, credit, appetites and acquiescence to systematic training.

What more?

Start with information. What do we actually want (including, crucially, to not be bothered by hype or manipulated by surveillance systems)?

Add intelligence. What do we know about products, markets, needs, and how things actually work than roboticized systems can begin to guess at?

Then add values, such as freedom, choice, agency, care for others, and the ability to collectivize in constructive and helpful ways on our own.

Then add tech. But this has to be our tech: customertech that we bring to market as independent, sovereign and capable human beings. Not just as “users” of others’ systems, or consumers (which Jerry Michalski calls “gullets with wallets and eyeballs”) of whatever producers want to feed us.

Time for solutions. Here is a list of fourteen market problems that can only be solved from the customers’ side.

And yes, we do need help from the sellers’ side. But not with promises to make their systems more “customer centric.” (We’ve been flagging that as a fail since 2008.) We need CRM that welcomes VRM. B2C that welcomes Me2B.

And money. Our startups and nonprofits have done an amazing job of keeping the VRM and Me2B embers burning. But they could do a lot more with some gas on those things.

ProjectVRM at 15

October 5, 2021 / / 0 Comments

This project started in September 2006, when I became a fellow at what is now the Berkman Klein Center. Our ambitions were not small.:

  1. To encourage development of tools by which individuals can take control of their relationships with organizations — especially in commercial marketplaces.
  2. To encourage and conduct research on VRM-related theories, usage of VRM tools, and effects as adoption of VRM tools takes place.

The photo above is of our first workshop, at Harvard Law School, in 2008. Here is another photo with a collection of topics discussed in breakout sessions:

Zoom in on any of the topics there (more are visible on the next photo in the album), and you will find many of them still on the table, thirteen years later. Had some prophet told us then that this would still be the case, we might have been discouraged. But progress has been made on all those fronts, and the main learning in the meantime is that every highly ambitious grassroots movement takes time to bear fruit.

One example is what we discussed in the “my red dot” breakout at the May 2007 Internet Identity Workshop (the 3rd of what next week will be our 33rd ) is now finally being done with the Byway, which is about to get prototyped by our nonprofit spin-off, Customer Commons, with help from the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University Bloomington, where Joyce and I are currently embedded as visiting scholars.

Our mailing list numbers 567 members, and is active, though it won’t hog your email flow. Check out the action at that link. And, if you like, join in.

You can also join in at our next gathering, VRM Day 2021b, which happens this coming Monday, 11 October.  We’ll visit our learnings thus far, and present progress and plans on many fronts, including

And we thank the BKC for its patience and faith in our project and its work.

Solving Subscriptions

May 25, 2021 / / 1 Comment

Count the number of companies you pay regularly for anything. Add up what you pay for all of them. Then think about the time you spend trying and failing to “manage” any of it—especially when most or all of the management tools are separately held by every outfit’s subscription system, all for their convenience rather than yours. And then think about how in most cases you also need to swim upstream against a tide of promotional BS and manipulation.

There is an industry on the corporate side of this, and won’t fix itself. That would be like asking AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy to fix the online service business in 1994. What we needed was the Internet, to solve the problem of them.

There’s also not much help coming from the subscription management services we have on our side: Truebill, Bobby, Money Dashboard, Mint, BillTracker Pro, Trim, Subby, Card Due, Sift, SubMan, and Subscript Me.

Nor from the subscription management systems offered by  Paypal, Amazon, Apple, or Google (e.g. with  Google Sheets and Google Doc templates).

All of those are too narrow, too closed, too exclusive, too easily purposed for surveillance of subscribers, and too vested in the status quo. Which royally sucks. For evidence, see here, or just look up subscription hell.

So it’s long past time to unscrew it. But how?

The better question is where?

The answer is on our side: the customer’s side.

See, subscriptions are a class of problems that can only be solved from the customers’ side. They can’t be solved from the companies’ side because they’ll all do it differently, and always in their interests before ours.

Also, most of them will want to hold you captive, just like Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy did with online services before the Internet solved that problem by obsolescing them.

Want the feds to come in and regulate it? Sure. Watch them gather “stakeholders” who aren’t you, all of them collaborating to create what will end up with captive regulators “protecting” you while preserving the exploitive properties all of them wish to preserve. Count on it.

A refresher: the Internet is ours. Meaning everybody’s. It doesn’t just belong to companies.

We need a similar move here. Fortunately, by makng subscriptions as easy as possible to make, change, and cancel—in standardized ways—companies living on subscriptions will do a better job of making their goods competitive.

Now to how.

The short answer is with open standards, code, and protocols. The longer answer is to start with a punch list of requirements, based on what we, as customers, need most. So, we should—

  • Be able to see all our subscriptions, what they cost, and when they start and end
  • Be able to cancel or renew, manually or automatically, in the simplest possible ways
  • Get the best possible prices
  • Be able to keep records of subscriptions and histories
  • Show our actual (rather than coerced) loyalty
  • Be able to provide constructive help, to loyal and experienced customers
  • Join in collectives—commons—of other customers to start normalizing the way subscriptions should be offered on the corporate side and managed on the personal side

What sellers need is to make money. Will they make more money in a world where their customers aren’t all captive?

Only if free customers prove more valuable—to them—than captive ones. So, whatever we create needs to prove that.

Some tech already exists for at least some of this, but we’ll leave that topic for another post. Meanwhile, give us suggestions in the comments below. Thanks!

Bonus link: From coffee to cars: how Britain became a nation of subscribers, by Tim Lewis in The Guardian. (Via John Naughton’s excellent newsletter.)

The modified image above is a Doctor Who TARDIS console, photographed by Chris Sampson, offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) license, published here, and obtained via Wikimedia Commons, here. We thank Chris for making it available.

Also, the original version of this post is at Customer Commons, here.

Let’s zero-base zero-party data

December 9, 2020 / / 1 Comment

Forrester Research has gifted marketing with a hot buzzphrase: zero-party data, which they define as “data that a customer intentionally and proactively shares with a brand, which can include preference center data, purchase intentions, personal context, and how the individual wants the brand to recognize her.”

Salesforce, the CRM giant (that’s now famously buying Slack), is ambitious about the topic, and how it can “fuel your personalized marketing efforts.” The second person you is Salesforce’s corporate customer.

It’s important to unpack what Salesforce says about that fuel, because Salesforce is a tech giant that fully matters. So here’s text from that last link. I’ll respond to it in chunks. (Note that zero, first and third party data is about you, no matter who it’s from.)

What is zero-party data?

Before we define zero-party data, let’s back up a little and look at some of the other types of data that drive personalized experiences.

First-party data: In the context of personalization, we’re often talking about first-party behavioral data, which encompasses an individual’s site-wide, app-wide, and on-page behaviors. This also includes the person’s clicks and in-depth behavior (such as hovering, scrolling, and active time spent), session context, and how that person engages with personalized experiences. With first-party data, you glean valuable indicators into an individual’s interests and intent. Transactional data, such as purchases and downloads, is considered first-party data, too.

Third-party data: Obtained or purchased from sites and sources that aren’t your own, third-party data used in personalization typically includes demographic information, firmographic data, buying signals (e.g., in the market for a new home or new software), and additional information from CRM, POS, and call center systems.

Zero-party data, a term coined by Forrester Research, is also referred to as explicit data.

They then go on to quote Forrester’s definition, substituting “[them]” for “her.”

The first party in that definition the site harvesting “behavioral” data about the individual. (It doesn’t square with the legal profession’s understanding of the term, so if you know that one, try not to be confused.)

It continues,

why-is-zero-party-data-important

Forrester’s Fatemeh Khatibloo, VP principal analyst, notes in a video interview with Wayin (now Cheetah Digital) that zero-party data “is gold. … When a customer trusts a brand enough to provide this really meaningful data, it means that the brand doesn’t have to go off and infer what the customer wants or what [their] intentions are.”

Sure. But what if the customer has her own way to be a precious commodity to a brand—one she can use at scale with all the brands she deals with? I’ll unpack that question shortly.

There’s the privacy factor to keep in mind too, another reason why zero-party data – in enabling and encouraging individuals to willingly provide information and validate their intent – is becoming a more important part of the personalization data mix.

Two things here.

First, again, individuals need their own ways to protect their privacy and project their intentions about it.

Second, having as many ways for brands to “enable and encourage” disclosure of private information as there are brands to provide them is hugely inefficient and annoying. But that is what Salesforce is selling here.

As industry regulations such as GDPR and the CCPA put a heightened focus on safeguarding consumer privacy, and as more browsers move to phase out third-party cookies and allow users to easily opt out of being tracked, marketers are placing a greater premium and reliance on data that their audiences knowingly and voluntarily give them.

Not if the way they “knowingly and voluntarily” agree to be tracked is by clicking “AGREE” on website home page popovers. Those only give those sites ways to adhere to the letter of the GDPR and the CCPA while also violating those laws’ spirit.

Experts also agree that zero-party data is more definitive and trustworthy than other forms of data since it’s coming straight from the source. And while that’s not to say all people self-report accurately (web forms often show a large number of visitors are accountants, by profession, which is the first field in the drop-down menu), zero-party data is still considered a very timely and reliable basis for personalization.

Self-reporting will be a lot more accurate if people have real relationships with brands, rather (again) than ones that are “enabled and encouraged” in each brand’s own separate way.

Here is a framework by which that can be done. Phil Windley provides some cool detail for operationalizing the whole thing here, here, here and here.

Even if the countless separate ways are provided by one company (e.g. Salesforce),  every brand will use those ways differently, giving each brand scale across many customers, but giving those customers no scale across many companies. If we want that kind of scale, dig into the links in the paragraph above.

With great data comes great responsibility.

You’re not getting something for nothing with zero-party data. When customers and prospects give and entrust you with their data, you need to provide value right away in return. This could take the form of: “We’d love you to take this quick survey, so we can serve you with the right products and offers.”

But don’t let the data fall into the void. If you don’t listen and respond, it can be detrimental to your cause. It’s important to honor the implied promise to follow up. As a basic example, if you ask a site visitor: “Which color do you prefer – red or blue?” and they choose red, you don’t want to then say, “Ok, here’s a blue website.” Today, two weeks from now, and until they tell or show you differently, the website’s color scheme should be red for that person.

While this example is simplistic, the concept can be applied to personalizing content, product recommendations, and other aspects of digital experiences to map to individuals’ stated preferences.

This, and what follows in that Salesforce post, is a pitch for brands to play nice and use surveys and stuff like that to coax private information out of customers. It’s nice as far as it can go, but it gives no agency to customers—you and me—beyond what we can do inside each company’s CRM silo.

So here are some questions that might be helpful:

  • What if the customer shows up as somebody who already likes red and is ready to say so to trusted brands? Or, better yet, if the customer arrives with a verifiable claim that she is already a customer, or that she has good credit, or that she is ready to buy something?
  • What if she has her own way of expressing loyalty, and that way is far more genuine, interesting and valuable to the brand than the company’s current loyalty system, which is full of gimmicks, forms of coercion, and operational overhead?
  • What if the customer carries her own privacy policy and terms of engagement (ones that actually protect the privacy of both the customer and the brand, if the brand agrees to them)?

All those scenarios yield highly valuable zero-party data. Better yet, they yield real relationships with values far above zero.

Those questions suggest just a few of the places we can go if we zero-base customer relationships outside standing CRM systems: out in the open market where customers want to be free, independent, and able to deal with many brands with tools and services of their own, through their own CRM-friendly VRM—Vendor Relationship Management—tools.

VRM reaching out to CRM implies (and will create)  a much larger middle market space than the closed and private markets isolated inside every brand’s separate CRM system.

We’re working toward that. See here.

 

Toward real market conversations

November 15, 2020 / / 12 Comments

A friend pointed me to this video of a slide presentation by Bixy, because it looked to him kinda like VRM.  I thought so too…. at first. Here’s an image from the deck:

bixy slide

Here is what I wrote back, updated and improved a bit:

These are my notes on slides within the deck/video.

1) It looks to me like a CRM refresh rather than VRM. There have been many of these. And, while Bixy looks better than any others I can remember (partly because I can’t remember any… it’s all a blur), it’s still pitching into the CRM market. Nothing wrong with that: it’s a huge market, with side categories all around it. It’s just not VRM, which is the customer hand CRM shakes. (And no, a CRM system giving the customer a hand to shake the CRM’s with isn’t VRM. It’s just gravy on a loyalty card.)

2) The notion that customers  (I dislike the word “consumers”) want relationships with brands is a sell-side fantasy. Mostly customers are looking to buy something they’ve already searched for, or to keep what they already own working, or to replace one thing with another that won’t fail—and to get decent service when something does fail. (For more on this subject, I suggest reading the great Bob Hoffman, for example here.)

3) While it’s true that customers don’t want to be tracked, annoyed and manipulated, and that those practices have led to dislike of businesses and icky legislation (bulls eye on all of those), and that “relationships are based on trust, value, attention, respect and communication,” none of those five things mean much to the customer if all of them are locked into a company’s one-to-many system, which is what we have with 100% of all CRM, CX and XX (pick your initialism) systems—all of them different, which means  a customer needs to have as many different ways to trust, value, attend to, respect and communicate as there are company systems for providing the means.

4) Bixy’s idea here (and what the graphic above suggests, is that the customer can express likes and dislikes to many Brands’ Salesforce CRM systems. They call this “sharing for value in return.” But there is far appetite for this than than marketing thinks.  Customers share as little as they can when they are fully required to do so, and would rather share zero when they go about their ordinary surfing online or shopping anywhere. Worse, marketing in general (follow the news)—and adtech/martech in particular—continue to believe that customers “share” data gathered about them by surveillance, and that this is “exchanged” for free services, discounts and other goodies. This is one of the worst rationalizations in the history of business.

5) “B2C conversations” that are “transparent, personalized and informative” is more a marketing fantasy than a customer desire. What customers would desire, if they were available, are tools that enhance them with superpowers.  For example, the power to change their last name, email address or credit card for every company they deal with, in one move. This is real scale: customer scale.  We call these superpowers customertech:

CRM is vendortech.

6) Some percentage of Adidas customers (the example in that video) may be willing to fill out a “conversational” form to arrive at a shoe purchase, but I suspect a far larger percentage would regard the whole exercise as a privacy-risking journey down a sales funnel that they’d rather not be in. So long as the world lacks standard ways for people to prevent surveillance of their private spaces and harvesting of personal data, to make non-coercive two-way agreements with others, and ways to monitor person data use and agreement compliance, there is no way trustworthy “conversations” of the kind Bixy proposes can happen.

7) Incumbent “loyalty” programs are, on the whole, expensive and absurd.

Take Peet’s Coffee, a brand I actually do love. I’ve been a customer of Peet’s for, let’s see… 35 years. I have a high-end (like in a coffee shop) espresso machine at my house, with a high-end grinder to match. All I want from Peet’s here at home are two kinds of Peet’s beans: Garuda and Major Dickason Decaf. That’s it. I’ve sampled countless single-origin beans and blends from many sources, and those are my faves. I used to buy one-pound bags of those at Peet’s stores; but in COVID time I subscribe to have those delivered. Which isn’t easy, because Peet’s has made buying coffee online remarkably hard. Rather than just showing me all the coffees they have, they want to drag me every time through a “conversational” discovery process—and that’s after the customary (for every company) popover pitch to sign up as a member, which I already am, and to detour through a login-fail password-recovery ditch (with CAPTCHAs, over and over, clicking on busses and traffic lights and crosswalks) that show up every. damn. time. On arrival at the membership home page, “My Dashboard” all but covers the home screen, and tells me I’m 8 points away from my next reward (always a free coffee, which is not worth the trouble, and not why I’m loyal). Under the Shop menu (the only one I might care about) there are no lists of coffee types. Instead there’s “Find Your Match,” which features two kinds of coffee I don’t want and a “take your quiz” game. Below that are “signature blends” that list nothing of ingredients but require one to “Find My Coffee” through a “flavor wheel” that gives one a choice of five flavors (“herbal/earthy,” “bright/citrus”…). I have to go waaay the hell down a well of unwanted and distracting choices to get to the damn actual coffee I know I like.

My point: here is a company that is truly loved (or hell, at least liked) by its customers, mostly because it’s better than Starbucks. They’re in a seller’s market. They don’t need a loyalty program, or the high operational and cognitive overhead involved (e.g. “checking in” at stores with a QR code on a phone app). They could make shopping online a lot simpler with a nice list of products and prices. But instead they decided, typically (for marketing), that they needed all this bullshit to suck customers down sales funnels. When they don’t. If Peet’s dumped its app and made their website and subscription system simpler, they wouldn’t lose one customer and they’d save piles of money.

Now, back to the Adidas example. I am sure anybody who plays sports or runs, or does anything in athletic shoes, would rather just freaking shop for shoes than be led by a robot through a conversational maze that more than likely will lead to a product the company is eager to sell instead of one the customer would rather buy.

7) I think most customers would be creeped to reveal how much they like to run and other stuff like that, when they have no idea how that data will be used—which is also still the typical “experience” online. Please: just show them the shoes, say what they’re made of, what they’re good for, and (if it matters) what celeb jocks like them or have co-branded them.

8) The “value exchange” that fully matters is money for goods. “Relationship” beyond that is largely a matter of reputation and appreciation, which is earned by the products and services themselves, and by human engagement. Not by marketing BS.

8) Bixy’s pitch about “90% of conversation” occurring “outside the app as digital widgets via publisher and marketer SDKs” and “omnichannel personalization” through “buy rewards, affiliate marketing, marketer insights, CRM & CDP, email, ads, loyalty, eCommerce personalization, brand & retailer apps and direct mail” is just more of the half-roboticized marketing world we have, only worse. (It also appears to require the kind of tracking the video says up front that customers don’t want.)

9) The thought of “licensing my personal information to brands for additional royalties and personalization” also creeps me out.

10) I don’t think this is “building relationships from the consumer point of view.” I think it’s a projection of marketing fantasy on a kind of customer that mostly doesn’t exist. I also don’t think “reducing the sales cycle” is any customer’s fantasy.

To sum up, I don’t mean to be harsh. In fact I’m glad to talk with Bixy if they’re interested in helping with what we’re trying to do here at ProjectVRM—or at Customer Commons, the Me2B Alliance and MyData.

I also don’t think Cluetrain‘s first thesis (“Markets are conversations“) can be proven by tools offered only by sellers and made mostly to work for sellers. If we want real market conversations, we need to look at solving market problems from the customers’ side. Look here and here for ways to do that.

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