Graham,No apologies needed for the flow of the thread.Your analysis, though, suffers from what might be called a missed context.VRM isn't a product. It isn't supposed to be "ready for prime time".VRM is a conversation.It's a way to engage in the business, technical, legal, and regulatory dialog needed to reshape our post-industrial world. The point is to create tools for independence and engagement, it isn't itself those tools.
VRM is way to think about balancing the asymmetry in customer-supplier relationships and a community of like minded, catalytic change makers figuring out how to do things differently.If VRM *were* ready for prime time, we wouldn't need this conversation. We'd just ship product and buy the good stuff.The work is in the work, and that's what we're here for.Because, in the end, there is incredible value for both individuals and companies when we simultaneously liberate and connect customers from, and with, suppliers.-jOn Fri, Mar 15, 2013, at 10:16 AM, Graham Hill wrote:Hi Doc
Thanks for responding to my post so quickly.
Apologies to Joe for responding via his post.
I think it is worthwhile pushing back at a number of points you made in this and other email posts. In the interest of developing a synthesis in a proper Hegelian Dialectic (Marketing works being essentially the thesis, VRM is a better alternative for end-consumers being the antithesis).
First, I would like to put a few of my cards on the table. I am not a big fan of VRM. That is not primarily because I am a marketing consultant with 20 years experience running marketing operations for major telcos, banks, high-tech manufacturers and automotive manufacturers, but rather because I think the value proposition for VRM has a massive fundamental flaw. Having said that, I am always on the look-out for new ideas that can help my clients make their marketing operations more effective. That is reason enough to engage with VRM, and collaborative consumption, and co-creation, and service-dominant logic, and a whole lot more besides.
The naming of VRM is relatively trivial at this point in time as VRM, or whatever you call it is clearly not ready for prime time yet. When it is ready, main-stream marketers will help you change the name to something that is a little more marketable and a whole lot more memetic.
VRM has all the hallmarks of an inside-out concept developed by a small group (even 1,000 people of which only a few % of them are actively involved is still a small group) of marketing outsiders with an axe to grind, rather than in response to an obvious need expressed by the marketing or end-consumer market. The Henry Ford quote is an irrelevant old chestnut that just illustrates how far away the inventors behind VRM are from the innovations required by potential end-consumers. Your point is well taken that many successful start-ups start with a great idea and then take it to market. But the ones that usually prosper are the ones whose products provide a better way to get an important end-consumer job done. The ones that fail, indeed the 90% that fail, are those whose products are irrelevant to end-consumers’ lives.
The Apple iStores millions of apps are a great case in point. The apps that do well are those that help end-consumers do one job really well, whether keeping in contact with friends, finding out if their flight is on time, or identifying the song playing in the background. App success follows a power-law distribution; for every successful app that makes its creator money there are thousands that lose their creators money hand over fist. The ones that work are the ones that help end-consumers do an important job better than the tools they currently have.
The examples that you quote of PCs, graphical browsers and smartphones are nice but also hardly relevant. And they miss the essential point that winning start-ups typically focus on making life easier for end-consumers to do things they want to do. VRM does not do this, nor from what I can see (and I am willing to be corrected) has any substantive work been done to look at, e.g. end-user shopping jobs-to-be-done, that would provide a clear set of requirements as to how to help them. Instead, a group of smart developers have taken it up themselves to develop products that the end-consumer should like. Don’t be surprised if they don’t!
I cannot for the life of me see why any end-consumer would be interested in VRM in its current form. Or why any end-consumer would be bothered to jump through all the hoops that it requires. Sure, there will always be a few early adopters that like to try things out, however, these are often not typically influencers. Why would an ordinary Joe, like me, bother to send out an RFP for my weekly groceries, or my next pre-paid telephone SIM card, or even my life insurance? There are plenty of intermediaries who will help me do this and as all marketers know, we are creatures of habit, unlikely to move supplier until things turn sour. And how would VRM help me discover new product categories that I don’t even know exist? Social curation through my peers will do that, but VRM? I don’t think so. And why should I trust a VRM vendor (VRM Vendor Relationship Management anyone?) to get me the best deal anyway. All I am doing is swapping one intermediary that I know for a new one that untried and untested.
I could potentially see why an advanced marketer would be interested in VRM. If it helps them develop more profitable relationships with customers that build incremental stickiness, loyalty and profitability. But marketers have a veritable arsenal of tools at their disposal already to help them do this: from good old promotions, through behaviourally targeted coupons, to points-based loyalty programmes. All of these depend on the marketer analysing the hell out of their existing customer data to identify little groups that may be in the market for this product or that service. And it clearly works. For a piece of frequent flyer programme strategy work that I have been doing for an airline client I reviewed 20 econometric studies of FFPs. A dominant airline at a hub with an FFP adds 12-18% of the average fare paid to the ticket price through creating member lock-in and 6-14% of the average fare paid to the price through reduced price sensitivity. With results like these already available through tried and tested tools, why would any FFP marketer be bothered to take a punt on VRM?
VRM is an interesting idea. And the consumerist in side of me really wants it to work. But currently it is just that; an idea. It’s biggest flaw is that it doesn’t obviously help end-consumers to do anything that they would remotely be expected to want to do. Now or in the future. Hoping that the first few VRM apps will steer them away from marketing with its behaviourally targeted messages, attractive promotions and addictive loyalty schemes is pure fantasy. Sadly, hope is not a viable business model.
I will stick with the VRM discussion through thick and thin. And if it ever becomes even remotely viable, I will be the first to start to talk about it to my corporate clients. But we are clearly not there yet. Somehow, I doubt if we ever will. Show me I am wrong!
Best regards from Cologne, Graham
Am 15.03.2013 um 16:46 schrieb Joe Andrieu:
Agreed. PIDM has just as many shortcomings, if not more, than VRM. It even costs 33% more in letterrs!Both names are so non-user friendly as to be practically useless in describing the value proposition to regular folks.VRM worked because it created traction and I sometimes use it to direct my discussions. If people know VRM, I can follow one path. Most do not, so I focus on benefits and use cases.PIDM suffers the same "management" conundrum. Nobody wants to have to manage anything. We just want to be able to. To me, PIDM ends up more limiting than clarifying. Identity is simply how we correlate parties between transactions. It's about how identifiers and identifying characteristics can be used to build a consistent mental/data model across contexts. It has nothing to do with the working data set that matters to what anyone is doing at any given time. My word documents or spreadsheets on my computer aren't my identity, but they are my data.
The most important words in this email, for example, have nothing to do with identity. But they are the important information context for anyone who might want to contribute in a meaningful way. Yes, it might matter that Doc said this or Nathan said that, or the Graham framed the initial post, but the words used by each shape the meaning of their names at least as much---and probably more than---their names shape the meaning of the words.
In the US discourse on identity, this has led to a specific separation between Identity Providers and Attribute Providers. Identity providers help you correlate people from session to session. Attributes give you more details about particular parties. Despite initially bundling attributes with identity, those behind FICAM, OIX, IDESG, and NSTIC have all acknowledged that identity and attributes are much more powerful and more gracefully handled when separated.
That said, identity should just work. And we should have sovereign control over any information shared and used on our behalf.But I have no idea what term will gel in the public discourse for describing the magic we're creating here. So, try another. Sooner or later something will stick.-jOn Fri, Mar 15, 2013, at 08:25 AM, Nathan Schor wrote:+1 Doc. To paraphrase some admiral “Damn the term. Full speed ahead”
Nathan Schor
Office Tower2™ – ‘Changing ecommerce – one office building at a time.’™
NetMeals™ – ‘Order online or wait in line.’™
CompenSumer™ – ‘A penny for your thoughts but real money for your intentions.’™
Sent: Friday, March 15, 2013 7:59 AMTo: Graham HillCc: Nathan Schor; ProjectVRM list; T-RobSubject: Re: [projectvrm] Is it Time to Switch from VRM to PIDMSeveral points to make here.First, there's no need to choose one category name over another. They're all fine. My personal inclination is to embrace everything that comes along, and trust that whatever we end up will have a name. Or a number of names. If VRM isn't one of them, I won't care.
For example, last year Martin Kuppinger at KuppingerCole decided that "Life Management Platforms" was a better and more encompassing term, and category, than VRM: <http://www.kuppingercole.com/report/advisorylifemanagementplatforms7060813412>. Rather than fight it, I embraced it: <http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vrm/2012/05/15/life-management-platforms/>. Likewise with UMA, with PIDM, with everything PDEC calls itself and its categories. Let's give them all support and room to succeed.
Second, we call what we're doing VRM for only one reason: the term caught on in early days while others didn't, and we needed a name for the project. The fact that business could understand VRM as the customer side counterpart of CRM was helpful. But again, if something better comes along, fine.
Third, identity management is one thing that will happen, inevitably, among other things in the VRM space. Choosing between VRM and PIDM is like choosing between fruit and orange. Also, FWIW, the VRM was born in part out of frustration with lack of progress in the identity development space. I've been involved in that space since the '90s. IIW <http://internetidentityworkshop.org> began as the "Identity Gang" on the last day of 2004 (on the same Gillmor Gang podcast during which Mike Vizard three years later uttered "VRM" for the first time). And IIW is still going strong, more than eight years later. VRM and identity issues are dealt with at IIW, side by side, twice a year, and progress always takes place.
And terms evolve. "Personal RFP" is now "intentcasting." "Personal Event Network" is now "Personal Cloud." Both may be called something else in another year. Either or both may succeed or fail. We don't know yet. As with life, every species is an experiment, and every one evolves, and eventually fails. Meanwhile, life doesn't just go on; it multiples and proliferates. The same goes for code, and for business. Look at apps. Six years ago, the term wasn't even in use. Now there are millions of app species. Six years from now, the whole category may be dead, and to have fertilized a dozen others.
Fourth, nobody is ever interested in a new category before it is given shape by applications people want once they see them. Personal computing, starting in '76, was positioned as "a way to do your checkbook and keep recipes." Really. None of the early hardware makers were especially successful, with the conditional exception of Apple, thanks to Visicalc. IBM took a look at Visicalc and introduced the PC in '82. But even then the PC succeeded in business in part because Attachmate and other companies sold micro-to-mainframe cards that turned $2500 PCs into $1000 IBM 3270 and DEC VT-100 and -200 "dumb terminals." But by then Visicalc had a foothold, as did Wordstar and DOS. Lotus 123 picked up where Visicalc left off, and a wave of applications followed. The Mac succeeded in part because of Quicken, which really did, finally, eight years after PCs were born, make balancing a checkbook easy. Quicken was an invention that mothered necessity, as were the rest of the early programs. Still, business dismissed PCs from '76 to '82, and ordinary people dismissed them until at least '84.
Likewise the Internet was nowhere until graphical browsers showed up. We forget that Bill Gates saw no way the Net could make money for itself, or anybody, until it was clear that Netscape's browsers and Web servers would threaten Microsoft to the core. That was in '95, when the Net's protocols, which we still use today, were up to decades old. Smartphones were Palm's idea, but not many people took advantage of the apps on them, because they were too hard to get and use. Once Apple showed how it could be done, the market exploded. That was more than a decade after Palm began. I remember an early VRM meeting at Berkman where Paul Trevithick said "Nothing that requires a user install will succeed." That was true, then. But not long after that, Apple made user-install easy, Google followed, and now all of us install apps with ease all the time. Yet it would be easy to say there was no appetite for the Internet in '93, or smartphones in '05. All we needed were inventions to mother necessity.
So, likewise, it's easy to say nobody cares about managing relationships with vendors, because, obviously, they don't. Or, do they?
What about the stacks of loyalty cards people keep on keychains, in their wallets and purses, or in the armrests of their cars? That's a crude form of management. What about clipping and carrying coupons, or spending hours or days adding up "points" from credit cards to trade in for miles on airlines? (I have a friend who is obsessed with doing that.) What about going over stacks of receipts and trying to match them up with credit card bills — arduously reviewing old calendars to see what we did and when, so we can minimize our tax hit? Is there no management in that?
Think of all the pain points any one of us deals with in relating to vendors — or anybody. All those pain points are potential business opportunities. Not all of them will be pursued, but none of them are worth dismissing because nobody seems interested in dealing with them now. As Henry Ford said, "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have said 'faster horses.'" To my Irish grandmother growing up in The Bronx, the biggest problems were horse manure piling up in the streets and the danger of fire from gas light. Neither problems were relieved by the industries of the time. Yet both horse-drawn wagons and gas light were obsoleted by new inventions.
Fourth, everybody manages data today already. We do it with folders on our hard drives, with bookmarks and tabs in our browsers, with boxes in our mail programs, and with every online service that organizes files for us. Are all these in such a complete and final state that they are un-improvable? Or is there opportunity here for many kinds of new approaches? Again, it's easy to say "nobody is interested." But it's not wise to bet against relieving whatever causes people pain. Or what opens up new opportunity where almost nobody is looking.
Fifth, the people addressing all the stuff I talked about above (and more) are not "a tiny group that has a bee in its bonnet about advertising's abuse of customer data." There are hundreds of people on this list, and thousands of people overall, who care about VRM and what we're trying to do with it.
And most of us don't care about advertising. (Though some do, and we respect that.) Fixing advertising's problems, or pursuing its opportunities, is almost entirely a vendor-side issue. My own attitude toward advertising is kind of like Ford's toward horses and trains: those things will keep doing what they're best for, and we'll go invent something else. My guess is that, if VRM succeeds, it will help brand advertising and hurt adtech or alter it for the better. But VRM's purpose has nothing to do with any of that.
Still, business senses that we are on to something here, so we can't help talking about it, and, in some cases, getting invited to conclaves where advertising is a big issue.
For example, yesterday I attended one of those things here in New York. The word "intention" was used a lot. The context was using "big data" to "intuit" what customers "intend," without ever having to listen to what those customers want to say, directly, to the "brands" doing the advertising. So the talk was about "listening in" on "conversations" among "consumers" in "social spaces" so those consumers could be "delivered" a "better experience." It was the sound of one hand slapping, not two hands clapping. A few voices from within the business were raised, saying "Are we listening to ourselves? Do we not realize that we're abusing people's privacy, and that this will have consequences?" As usual those voices were mostly not heard. But the wilderness from which those voices were raised is called the marketplace.
Are those voices pointing toward actual requirements, as you suggest? Well, let's look at what the market is already doing.
Today the most popular browser extensions are ones that block advertising and turn off tracking. Governments (especially in Europe) want to switch off tracking altogether, because their citizens are tired of it. These are significant trends. Look up "privacy" on Google or Bing and see how many results you get, and the order in which they are prioritized. Is there no market for solutions here?
Personally, I don't want legislative relief. Anti-adtech laws today will protect yesterday from last Thursday with legal code that won't change for decades, or perhaps ever. On the whole that's not good in a vital and fast-changing marketplace. I'd rather come up with technic fixes that will take care of business without new laws. (Though perhaps with legal decisions based on standing laws. Those are likely to happen in any case.)
Finally, just because a glass is 1/Nth full doesn't mean that it's X/Nths empty, or can't be filled. Faith, St. Paul tells us, is "the evidence of things unseen." Without it we wouldn't have civilizations, or markets. There would be demand only for the hides of animals and sharpened rocks.
VRM isn't complicated. It's only about giving customers means toward two things: independence and engagement. To see how that can be done, one needs to stand on the side of the customer. So that's what we're doing.
DocOn Mar 15, 2013, at 3:42 AM, Graham Hill < " style="text-decoration:underline;color:blue" target="_blank"> > wrote:
NathanPersonally, I much prefer Personal Identity Management = PIDM over Vendor Relationship Management = VRM. PIDM speaks to a real and present issue in the mind of millions of potential users, namely, wresting back control of their identity in a way that suits them. Of the hundreds of ordinary people I speak to each week in my consulting work, many are concerned about their losing their identities, the rise of aggressive data collectors like Facebook, Google and Apple, and the little they get back from their data in return. In fact, many of them have personal stories of bad things that happened to their identity or to the identites of people they know. Practically none of these people are interested in actively managing their data as an interface to vendors as envisaged in VRM.
As this forum has lamented many times in the past. VRM's value proposition isn't valuable to ordinary folk out there. They are simply NOT INTERESTED in managing relationships with vendors; with the odd, one-off exception for big ticket items like switching power provider for a whole neighbourhood (happened to a friend who happens to be Director of Marketing for a big Scottish insurer). You can build VRM applications, but it is unlikely that users will come to use them. VRM enables a job-to-be-done that no normal person is interested in doing. PIDM on the other hand is a job that everyone wants to do (with minimal effort of course).
Perhaps it is time to switch the mental model from one powered by a tiny group that has a bee in its bonnet about advertising's abuse of customer data... to a much larger potential group that helps customers keep some semblance of control over their own identity.
The history of invention in general and startup invention in particular is that approximately 90% of startups fail. The single biggest reason they fail is because they didn't uderstand their target market's requirements in the first place. Don't be one of the 90%.
Best regards from Cologne, GrahamAm 14.03.2013 um 17:07 schrieb Nathan Schor:I totally agree about bringing her up to speed. Here is a comment from her report that I use as part of my pitch material:
“Expect aggressive acquisition attempts for the startups in this arena. Emerging PIDM (Personal Identity Management) startups have already caught venture capital attention — several have procured investments from major venture capital firms, and almost all have venture capital luminaries on their advisory boards.
Add to this the wealth of opted-in data they’ll soon have collected from savvy consumers, andit’s impossible to ignore how attractive these firms become for acquisition.”
– Personal Identity Management: Preparing for a World of Consumer-Managed Data
Although her nomenclature –PIDM (Personal Identity Management) – may cause confusion when compared to our VRM term, she is hugely influential amongst funders, so it would be great to have her appear at IIW. In fact, one of her colleagues attended the last session:
Eve Maler Principal Analyst Security Forrester 425.345.6756 617.613.8820 " style="text-decoration:underline;color:blue" target="_blank">
If anyone has a relationship with Eve perhaps that could be a springboard for inviting Fatimah.
Nathan Schor
" style="text-decoration:underline;color:blue" target="_blank">
Office Tower2™ – ‘Changing ecommerce – one office building at a time.’™
NetMeals™ – ‘Order online or wait in line.’™
CompenSumer™ – ‘A penny for your thoughts but real money for your intentions.’™
-----Original Message-----
From: Doc Searls [ " style="text-decoration:underline;color:blue" target="_blank">mailto: ]
Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2013 8:07 AMTo: T-RobCc: ProjectVRM list; " style="text-decoration:underline;color:blue" target="_blank">
Subject: [projectvrm] Re: [personal-clouds] Heads-up: Webinar todayGood that you cross-posted it. I encourage people to attend it. Alas, I'll be in a meeting all afternoon, and won't make it.
Background: Fatemeh's blog:
<http://blogs.forrester.com/fatemeh_khatibloo>
We need to do a better job of keeping her current on what developers here are up to.
Doc
On Mar 14, 2013, at 10:08 AM, T-Rob < " style="text-decoration:underline;color:blue" target="_blank"> > wrote:
> Thought you all might be interested. Deliberately cross-posting so if
> you reply, please remove the other list from distribution.
>
> -------------------------
> Webinar: Personal Data and Privacy - Is the consumer the boss?
> Date: March 14, 2013 | Time: 2 pm ET / 11 am PT | Duration: 1 hour
>
> Companies and consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the value
> and risks associated with the collection, use, and dissemination of
> personal data. On the one hand, our personal data is the fuel behind
> our highly connected, increasingly digital lives. On the other hand,
> using it inappropriately can lead to damaging consequences.
>
> This webinar will explore Forrester Analyst Fatemeh Khatibloo's
> characterization of a new Personal Identity Management market as well
> as solutions for participating in the Identity Economy.
>
> Speakers:
> Fatemeh Khatibloo, Senior Analyst, Forrester Nick Crown, Director of
> Product Marketing, UnboundID
>
> http://www.fiercecio.com/offer/identitymanagement?source=stack
> -------------------------
>
> Not sure if this will be useful or just marketing for UnboundID, I'd
> love to attend just to see which it is and what Fatemah is saying
> about digital identity, but have a conflict.
>
> -- T.Rob
>
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Dr. Graham HillPartnerOptima PartnersSenior AssociateNyras Capital--Dr. Graham HillPartnerOptima PartnersSenior AssociateNyras Capital
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