Doc Searls on The Intention Economy
April 08, 2009
I'm late to this, but I thought Doc Searls' thoughts on the Intention Economy were so interesting I wanted to record them here for posterity rather than just bookmark (from a Berkman lunch livblogged by Doc's fellow Cluetrain author Weinberger,found via Adriana)
"The problem is that most big businesses think that the best customer is a captive one." "That's why the free market is still your choice of captor." But "we're now about three minutes into the Big Bang" when it comes to the Net. The challenge is to "prove that a free customer is more valuable than a captive one."
So, Doc has started Project VRM (vendor relationship management) to provide ways for customers to drive relationships with vendors. More on that here. I was privileged enough to be able to attend an early VRM meeting with Doc and Adriana (pictured below by me) in London last February. I think it's very interesting to see the project develope, and with the intellectual giants involved I'm hopeful that it may be the next big thing.
So, what happens when customers get real power?
- “Customers get their own pricing guns” [i.e., the "guns" that print out price labels].
- “The intention economy” will get real because it’s based on what customers really want, as opposed to the attention economy that’s based on guesses.
- “The advertising bubble will burst.” There will still be ads, but they won’t be the “communications method of first resort.”
- “Cluetrain will finally be right.”
For some reason, the RSS feed I subscribed to from Doc's blog seem to have stopped working, must fix (and by putting a note about that here I might even remember when I come back in from the rain:-) ). Update 19-04/09: and when I get the RSS-feed from Doc's blog up an running again, and find time to read it, I find this post on After the advertising bubble bursts, which explains more)
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