Research

Testing Principles

The idea behind VRM is to equip individuals with tools that make them independent leaders and not just captive followers in their relationships with vendors and other parties on the supply sides of markets. VRM will be successful when customers get direct benefits from taking control of their relationships (including the data they acquire and generate) -- and vendors see alternatives to customer lock-in for gaining loyalty and generating profit.

This vision makes several assumptions. Primarily, that a free customer is more valuable than a captive one (both to himself or herself and to vendors). Testing this hypothesis (or more accurately, specific versions and aspects of this hypothesis) is the goal of our current research. A number of questions come up:

What characterizes a free customer? (Autonomy? Ability to engage independently? Something else?) How will customers know they are free? What are the potential benefits to a vendor for freeing a customer -- or dealing with customers that are already free? How can customers signal their freedom to vendors? How will that freedom attract vendors? (What makes a free customer more attractive than a captive one?) What do free customers bring to markets that captive ones don't? By what social and economic processes will freedom for customers become normative and not merely desirable? In our first round of research, we are creating an information gathering process in which subjects are placed in either a free or captive customer scenario and subsequently asked to enter personal information of several kinds. Different treatments within this experiment will test participants' willingness to engage, exchange information, and offer the experience to their friends.

Subjects in both groups will be told that an information-gathering tool is being tested. The "captive" group will be presented with a vendor-driven information gathering tool, about which will be made clear that the data gathered can be used by the vendor. The other group will be presented with a user-driven information gathering tool, in which it will be made clear that the data gathered is not for any vendor but for the subject's own use, and cannot be shared without the user's permission.

These experiments should begin in March or April 2010. We are working with Berkman's Cooperation Group on these experiments, and thank them for their valuable assistance.