Sorry for the late and sparse reply. Spent the day fighting off identity theft. Wondering whether I used the same security question on Adobe as on my credit card online banking because that's the most likely source of the breach so far as I can tell. The account in question does NOT have 2-factor authentication. My other accounts do and were not invaded (yet). Also, different long random passwords on all sites probably stemmed the tide. Anyway, I do not disagree that there's a lot of money in the intent to buy scenarios. I'm just saying there's a disconnect between the consumer and the vendor as to where the value is. In Adrian's world it's about long-term trust. There's an actual relationship there. In Bill Wendell's world it's about the magnitude of the risk riding on one transaction. This is perhaps also a relationship requiring trust, but of shorter duration. For retail goods, both the vendor and the product are commodities. Retailers have been competing on price so long, how can they expect to be anything other than a commodity? If the benefit to me of VRM is that I get an additional monetary incentive if I reveal my intent to purchase a particular good, this amounts to a slight permutation on price competition. Among the vendors, the first mover gets some temporary advantage but that disappears when everyone starts doing it. In the middle ground between hummus and housing, it doesn't become a relationship until the consumer is engaged for more than a single transaction. But what I want to do isn't the same as what's already going on in the pre-sales cycle. Intent-to-buy limits me to what's offered. Marketing limits me to what's offered. I want to be able to influence what comes to offer. We've all heard the term "Internet years" which refers to the short lifecycle of technologies on the Internet compared to traditional goods. Well guess what – hardware is the new software. With 3D printers, open source hardware and crowd funding, we won't need to wait for the likes of GE, Sony or Ford to make the products we want. Hardware years will soon shrink on a scale proportional to software years. Once we assume a very quickly shrinking design/sell cycle in hard goods like we've seen in software and are beginning to see in hardware, it follows that there will very quickly be a need to manage consumer requirements the way we currently aspire to manage intent to buy. I'm not suggesting that the VRM community should start looking further upstream because I believe there's lots of money there. I'm suggesting there will come a time when operating there is life or death and those who aren't thinking about it now might find themselves unable to respond when it becomes obvious. I tend to be just far enough ahead on these things to be a crackpot, but let's revisit this in a year and see if it doesn't look different. -- T.Rob With apologies to other respondents. I may circle back around and reply to some of these once I get past the initial hump of the ID theft thing and get caught up on missed billable hours. I keep telling myself it coulda been a lot worse. From: Doc Searls [mailto:
] I'll move your link for this post to the top here... And add what I just posted as a comment:
Doc On Dec 17, 2013, at 9:20 AM, T.Rob <
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> wrote: I've never really liked the laser-like focus on "intent to buy" as the primary VRM signal. It seeks to intervene just prior to the exchange of value and makes too many limiting assumptions about what value actually is. My usual example is that I'd like to communicate intent through policy settings such as "don't show me DRM-enabled content when I search" or "show me DRM-enabled content only if nothing else is available." If people set these policies in sufficient numbers, it could send a clear signal to vendors. When it comes to "smart" appliances and Internet of Things, vendors have been putting out crap and assume the lack of signal means we aren't interested. The MASSIVE success of crowdfunding IoT devices demonstrates that absence of interest signal is not signal of interest absence. The territory between purchase intent and preference signaling might perhaps be called "intent to form intent." I seem to be in Major Purchase Hell at the moment as all of my big-ticket items are dying off. After several iterations, I've come to realize that selling intent to purchase, as it is usually discussed in the VRM community, is inadequate to my needs. When my lawn tractor was diagnosed with a $500 repair I needed to make a quick repair/buy decision. Unfortunately, there is no such thing. You must first research the market to see what you'd buy if you bought new, then research the quality reviews from Consumer Reports and similar, then figure out your best price on the potential replacement. Perhaps you go through a similar process for used items. Once you have that you can make an informed repair purchase decision. Whether this ever becomes intent to spend money depends on whether you are the repair shop or the dealer. Until I've made the decision, neither the shop nor the dealer have a strong incentive to participate. If I eventually decide to buy, a retailer may find my intent signal interesting. But nearly all of my investment in time and effort occurs well before I ever get to that point. Once I do buy a new lawn tractor, the retail vendor is once again out of the picture. Where VRM stands to help me most is the relationship with the repair shop because that's who I see at least once a year for service, and with the manufacturer as a source of authoritative information and to express design preferences. This is why, at least to me, focusing on purchase intent misses most of the potential for VRM. The vendor may like that model because they repeat that transaction frequently. For me, that's often a once-a-decade or less transaction. Why optimize it? Or, more to the point, why spend time optimizing that instead of the activities where most of my time and effort is spent? Sure there is some benefit in saving $50 or $100 on a lawn tractor in that one transaction I do every 10 or 20 years. But that's VM, not VRM. Personally, I'd gladly forgo the $50 or $100 at purchase if I could reduce the investment of time prior to the sale (the "intent to form intent" phase) or over the lifetime of the tractor. Anyway, these are some random thoughts that occurred to me during the course of recently repairing/replacing… * Lawn tractor * Garage door springs * Dishwasher * Icemaker * Built-In microwave * Built-in oven * Broken HVAC duct actuator in a zoned system …which involved lots of time, many potential purchase decisions, and thousands of dollars expended, but none of which resulted in the sale of a replacement item. That's a helluvalotta VRM opportunity for my service providers and device manufacturers, but not even one signal-my-intent-thru-my-browser event ever resulted from it. VRM has to live where I live, where I expend most of my time and attention. If all it wants to do is live in my browser when I click [BUY] then it's just VM. -- T.Rob |
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