Re: [projectvrm] Is VRM an Ideologically-inspired Dead-end?

[Joe Andrieu < >]

Note: Much deleting of prior comments for clarity.

 

On Sun, Mar 17, 2013, at 07:23 PM, Doc Searls wrote:

 

But my real point was conditional: If it turned out to be true that people can't succeed with intentcasting, then it is necessarily true that vendors can't succeed with tracking.

 

On Mar 17, 2013, at 5:43 PM, Chris Savage < "> > wrote:

 

I am somewhat skeptical of intentcasting (but only somewhat) because I am skeptical of our ability to know ourselves well enough to make reliably good choices.  But I think that with some luck and training, can probably do pretty well for ourselves.

 

I should be clear that with intentcasting we've always tried to concentrate on the subset of cases where people actually do know exactly what they want. These do exist.

 

But if people really don't know themselves, and can't know themselves, well enough to make reliably good choices (that is, buy stuff that actually meets our needs and makes us happy), then some vendor trying to sell us stuff by means of tracking is going to do even worse. 

 

So: If it turns out to be true that vendors can succeed by tracking individuals, it must also be true that individuals can succeed (and probably even more so) by intentcasting.

 

Good, thanks!

 

Putting it in terms of roles, any marketer who believes that he can make more money by tracking individuals, has to believe that individuals, properly empowered, can make good choices (and better choices) on their own.

 

Chris S.

 

Anybody else want to jump in on this?

 

Yes.

 

This notion of "reliably good choices" is a weird strawman. And it belies the essential patronizing position that plenty of marketers have about being able to make more money with tracking while believing that individuals couldn't possible make good choices on their own. Given all the data and tools and strategic resources (like knowing how to build particular types of products well), of course marketers can easily believe that the average individual couldn't possibly do it better.

 

I mean... it's like a feudal lord actually believing it would help the situation if commoners actually go involved in government. Our current sensibility is different, but it was a quite reasonable thing to believe. After all, commoners couldn't be expected to understand the political, strategic, and military consequences of the matters of state...

 

 

To return to your original challenge, Chris:

 

>> The alternative view is that the entire notion of identifying and predicting customer buying behavior is chimerical.

 

>> I think there is a non-trivial possibility that the alternative is, in fact, correct.  The underlying idea here would be that

>> purchasing decisions are essentially a random phenomenon.  Not unpredictable in the aggregated, but individually

>> random.  You can know that if you offer (say) $5000 off on a new car, more people will buy it, but you can't really

>> know which more people will buy it.  (Think of nuclear decay.  You can know that on average X% of Uranium nuclei

>> will emit neutrons within Y period, but it is impossible to predict which ones, or precisely when.)  The more high-falutin'

>> way to present it would be to say that human decisionmaking arises from a chaotic, complex adaptive system.

>> Very small changes in inputs can unpredictably lead to vast differences in outputs.

 

This conclusion isn't merited by your arguments. I realize you set this up to critically examine it, but the essentials don't hold.

 

The market operates on the law of large numbers. The chaotic actions of any individual *do not* lead to vast differences in outputs.  If you want to challenge the notion of tracking with that conclusion, you might be better off with a Black Swan argument, but that will almost certainly lead to special case situations, and not to an analysis of the overall system dynamics.

 

Marketing, segmentation, focus groups, etc., work--to the degree they do--because of the law of large numbers.

 

Intentcasting and tracking aren't about finding the "one true, perfect sales opportunity". They about doing better by leveraging more data. For that, tracking has proven itself. Arguably the entire last quarter of the 20th century IT investment was about making more money by tracking more data. It worked. It may not be pretty or nice or respectful of individuals, but companies that figured out how to play the market using large numbers, e.g., Walmart and Amazon, have done very very well. Sure, many failed--it wasn't a panacea and it wasn't easy--but it more data changed the game in almost every industry.

 

The problem with the asymmetric investment in IT is that it tended to build systems focused on a single corporation (at a time). Solve *this* particular company's problems, now.  The most relevant changes since the invention of the computer (IMO), the Internet and the World Wide Web, weren't built that way. They were built from a systems perspective, one that connected and enabled outside the organizational boundary.

 

Done properly, intentcasting and self-tracking can connect information across organizational boundaries, with explicit control in the hands of the individual. They become our tools for engagement, and by their nature, for independence as well.

 

That's what's useful about VRM. It leverages the best source for individual intention across organizational boundaries.

 

No one is saying that any particular VRM idea is going to allow vendors to easily meet all my desires at the best bundle of price, features, and distribution. It isn't even going to make them meet my most important desires.

 

But what it will do is give individuals better ways to participate in the electronically mediated conversation that ultimately drives which products and services do make it into my life. And with that participation, agile companies will be able to be more in tune, more responsive, and more profitable. We are all rather disconnected from what we really want. If we weren't, we'd be fully engaged in realizing it (and very few of us make that goal). There isn't a gold standard of "reliably good choices", just choices that are different, and may be better than yesterday's.

 

There's no silver bullet here. There are just ideas for how to do things better. And with enough "better" ideas from the VRM conversation, we will see more and more liberation and freedom as vendors realize more value from engagement rather than exploitation. Among those ideas there are going to be more that fail than succeed, but those that succeed can dramatically change our society. That's how markets work.

 

-j

 

--

Joe Andrieu

SwitchBook

+1(805)705-8651

>> 

>> 

>>