Daily Post 1378
THE INTENTION ECONOMY
Doc Searls in book titled The Intention Economy says ”Free markets require free customers.” Are customers really free? Do they fall anywhere in the supply side scheme of things , only to be manipulated in the worst of the ways, ending up with the platitude; customer is the king. Customer has become a concubine of the supply side, the self serving businesses, to the extent that IT behemoths and product & service aggregators are busy enriching the customer experience even without he knowing of it. Even if the customers don’t want that enrichment, it will keep on happening as this is the business & financial model the world has been forced to wed.
The real life problem which the author wants to sort out is, ”Why build an economy around attention, when intention is where the money comes from?” From this concept emanates the idea of Intention Economy to which this book is fully devoted, revolutionising the very mechanism of buying and selling and in the process trade / commerce and the like. Buyer is at the centre of business / market / trade, whatever you call it. In every economic activity, it his money or the likelihood of getting his money transacted, is at its core. Putting the current business models on its head, buyers being the first source of money, they come ready-made. The core is ”you don’t need advertising to make them…”
The present markets are the collection of silos, but the true Intention Economy would be built around truly open markets. All of us as buyers we have experienced the truly non-open markets, where our only concern is to keep finding out whether we are paying right price as both quality and the business deal, always remain a challenge. Are we as buyers duty bound to make all types of discoveries and then still be open to getting duped. ”In the Intention Economy the customers don’t have to fly from silo to silo, the buyer instead notifies the market of his intent to buy and the sellers compete for the buyers purchase.”
It would her paradigm shift in what have gone through since the onset of consumerism and today we are completely lost into it. We can’t even think of a model which would work in favour of the customer / the buyer. ”The Intention Economy is about buyers finding sellers, not sellers finding (or “capturing”) buyers.” The sellers compete for the buyers business. ProjectVRM was launched by Harvard University for vendor relationship management- this can termed as the customer side counterpart of the CRM, or the customer relationship management; junk mail / call centers etc. ProjectVRM aimed at fixing a broken system from the customer side, developing new systems to complement existing businesses. It would be built on natural independence of human beings. The basic thought being, Free customers are more valuable than the captive ones.”
GIVING FULL FREEDOM TO CUSTOMERS TODAY IS THOUGHT TO BE THE NEMESIS OF BUSINESS ITSELF.