Graham,
I am very new to the whole VRM/PIDM/etc. space. But from my
perspective the immediate value of the idea is to somehow (a)
protect people from misuse of information from and about them and
(b) permit people to do proactively (or, more properly, to have a
software/machine agent do proactively), from the buyer side,
what the data-mining/behavioral advertising/targeted advertising
folks want to do from the seller side -- direct individualized
intention-to-buy (or at least real intention-to-think-about-buying)
to vendors who have relevant stuff to sell.
One of Doc's points, with which I agree, is that that function is
insanely easier and more effective from the buyer side than from the
seller side. The short version of the reason why is that a person's
observable behavior provides only very limited information about
what the person actually wants -- what will make
them happy (or happy enough to buy stuff) -- and does so on a
phenomenally noisy channel, and inherently so. Most of the time we
ourselves don't know why (or at least exactly why) we do what we
do. Nobody's going to figure that out for us, better than we can,
by watching what we do. The inputs to the choices are so ephemeral
and obscure that they cannot be reverse-engineered from observing
the behavior.
Now if (as you suggest) there's not really a lot of value in this
positive (rather than protective) side of the inherently buyer-side
VRM project, that necessarily implies to me that there is even less
value in trying to do it from the seller side. I.e., the whole data
mining/individualized advertising business model is an illusion.
(Note that this can be true even if there is value from the buyer
side for the reasons noted above.)
Putting it bluntly, if VRM can't work, then neither can the
seller-side complementary activity.
Chris S.
On 3/15/2013 1:16 PM, Graham Hill
wrote:
"
type="cite">
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.
-j
On 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
305.632.1368
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 AM
To:
Graham Hill
Cc:
Nathan Schor; ProjectVRM list; T-Rob
Subject:
Re: [projectvrm] Is it Time to Switch from VRM
to PIDM
Several 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.
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.
Nathan
Personally, 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,
Graham
Am 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;">
If
anyone has a relationship with Eve perhaps
that
could be a springboard for inviting
Fatimah.
Nathan
Schor
"
style="text-decoration: underline;
color: blue;">
305.632.1368
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-----
Sent:
Thursday, March 14, 2013 8:07 AM
To:
T-Rob
Subject:
[projectvrm] Re: [personal-clouds]
Heads-up: Webinar today
Good
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;">
> 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
>
>
____________________________________________________________
>
You received this message as a subscriber
on the list:
>
"
style="text-decoration: underline; color:
blue;">
>
To be removed from the list, send any
message to:
>
"
style="text-decoration: underline; color:
blue;">
>
>
For all list information and functions,
see:
>
http://lists.pde.cc/lists/info/personal-clouds
--
Dr. Graham Hill
UK +44 7564
122 633
DE +49 170
487 6192
Partner
Optima
Partners
Senior
Associate
Nyras Capital
--
Joe Andrieu
SwitchBook
+1(805)705-8651
|