It may sound like a Disney song, but “a whole new world” of doing business was on the table at a meeting I went to last night. It was to listen to a few ideas from Doc Searls latterly from Harvard, a pioneer of the internet having dropped everything in 1989: “I didn’t know why but I knew it’d be big”.
He’s perhaps best known for being a co-author of the “Clue Train Manifesto” which amongst its 95 declarations 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”. So as you can imagine that appeals to us at Budd. In fact it reads like a catalogue of dumb things. It makes you wish you’d thought of it!
It also claims “Markets are conversations”.
One of the insights Doc shared was from a Nigerian pastor. “When you’re in a market and you see something you like, how do you open the conversation? An American would say: “How much does it cost?”. But a Nigerian wouldn’t. If you talk for 20 minutes and learn a lot about how it was made, who did it and why and so on – and vice versa, why the buyer is there, why they might want it etc - then what happens to the price? It will be different. It will represent a different thing.
He was explaining the difference between “two moral systems”. In the pastor’s view: money and relationship. Too much of the commercial or western world is based on money. Much of the world is based on relationship not money. The two clash exactly in that Robert Redford & Demi Moore film “Indecent Proposal” where the question is “what price for your wife?”. That clash is of systems is why marketing and CRM don’t work. Why sellers don’t really mean they want a relationship. Ultimately why companies don’t listen to consumers.
On the othe hand, if you go to the market to have a conversation, you’ll learn a lot and you may find something that works for both buyer and seller needs. Only then do you set a value on it. If you go to market to look for price, you will get what you get. Too much of the commercial world goes to market to sell things, not to start meaningful conversations.
The point is that, in our commercial world, we are trying to bring together two systems, of relationship and money that don’t come together, unless you look at the world in a different way. So what is this whole new world?
Well Doc is now focusing his time on this question. Because he thinks it will be as transforming as industrialisation, the internet or blogging.
He’s not alone in that many other groups have been interested for some while. Not least the snappily titled “Buyer Centric Commerce Forum” which started in 2002 around the work of author Alan Mitchell and his book “Right Side Up”.
It’s a space where consumers and businesses have equal power. Where marketing’s one way conversations of one to many and the buying of products by individuals is replaced. Information smoothes out the blindness to performance and price. So buyers can see what other buyers can see. The conversations on the web are too fast and complete to let ignorance of competitive offerings go unaddressed. Eventually buyer and seller power are more equally dispersed. But not without responsibility for the buyer.
So you can see this happening already. What is so radical? Well the next step…. Let’s see if I can exemplify it.
The key may lie in something called “vendor relationship management or VRM”. Sounds like CRM through the looking glass.
Buyers own their own data about themselves and businesses are vendors who are permitted to use the data for a specific purpose when sanctioned by the buyer. When someone wants something they describe their problem, specify it and put their need on line. Companies or vendors who can meet that need are allowed to look at that buyer information and the relevant personal information so that they can start a conversation and eventually decide what to “bid” as a solution and at what price to bid.
The company doesn’t need to buy, collect or hold lots of data in CRM systems. It doesn’t need to spam lots of people to find sales leads. It doesn’t need to advertise to generate demand. It doesn’t need to offer an approximate solution. It can have complete up to date data with which to have a good conversation with its potential customer. It can, if permitted, have relevant, accurate data from all its customers.
The economics of marketing change. The marketing costs can go down to zero. The cost of converting leads goes down to zero. The costs of considering needs and deciding what to sell will rise. And the speed of learning what sells will be instant. The tailoring of offers will be common place. It’s “just in time” buying where the customers set out their demand and vendors decide who and how best to meet that demand.
There could be an increased cost to the customer in time. Time to keep their data up to date? But in practice wouldn’t this be a saving? A saving over talking to many vendors who cant meet your need, who ask for the same old same old data to be able to understand who you are and what you want.
No one has the mechanisms yet, but they probably aren’t complicated. Think of a series of web pages or feeds that you own: WhoIam.com; WhatIwant.com; Whatdoyouthink.com. And an equivalent set that the company or vendor owns: Whatwecanoffer.com. And what’s in the middle? WhatelseIcouldget.com. Whatsbestforyou.com. VRM? Not so very different maybe. But think about the way the process would have changed.
Let’s say I want to get a weekend away. I check whoIam.com is complete with my latest data. I go to a virtual coach on whatIwant.com and work out as much as I can about what I want. I then release a feed into the middle, into the VRM or whatever that “matrix” comes to mean. I get questions from whatwecanoffer.com and I decide what I want. It’s been run through whatelsecoudIget.com already so I know if its ok because of what lots of people say.
Not so different from a reverse auction on eBay. Or Amazon’s ecosystem maybe.
The fundamental difference? Behaviours of buyers and sellers would change. A buyer gets help to specify what is their need. Buyers who can’t specify their need, or who aren’t yet ready to buy, don’t come forward to absorb sales effort. A seller gets free buyer leads. It has all the data they need to sell the right thing. Sellers who try to sell things that don’t meet needs, change or disappear fast. The waste in traditional sales and marketing disappears.
It’s a frightening thought for wasteful businesses with big sales and marketing budgets. It’s great for upstart businesses who change their marketing $$ into listening $$. They change their approach and win.
But how will it happen in practice?
We don’t know, but that’s what this meeting was about. Maybe it starts with building some simple prototypes.
Maybe it’s already happening. A client told me the other day their business was changing. Their clients, insurance companies, were losing business very fast to the aggregators – moneysupermarket.com, confused.com etc. This is an early example – but its still in the old world. Its product and seller centric. Imagine those aggregator tools applying to everything you want and being you centric… . Data entered once into a secure facebook/eBay/Amazon for buying. A whole new world. Just around the corner
Get in touch if you’d like to stretch your thinking…. peter.massey@budd.uk.com
