Ctrl-Shift - Understanding Consumer Empowerment

In our newsletter this month we have new research to tell you about. We also highlight our project looking at the Internet of Things market and round off with some key news, including some international developments.

Decisions Decisions    

We’ve published our briefing paper about the development of a revolutionary and disruptive industry for consumer decision-support services. These services empower consumers by helping them to make better decisions and change their own behaviours. The report explains why this revolution is happening now, what forms it’s taking, and what its impacts are: this is a new market that changes…

First came 'pure play' internet companies like Amazon and eBuy, then 'bricks and clicks' came along. Today, in retailing especially, online is about the only bright spot and for most customer facing companies 'multi-channel', face to face, phone, online, mobile, is now a must.

The challenges of multi-channel are well known. Customers increasingly expect to be able to jump seamlessly from one channel to another, but actually providing this seamless experience is a massive operational and data headache. Given the penalties for failing to achieve this (basically, loss of customers) and the contrasting upsides – a reputation for service plus…

Following the recent London Green Hackathon, the winning hacks have now been announced. It’s inspiring to see what a few ingenious minds can create over a weekend using only data that’s freely available. When organisations start releasing customer data in a portable, reusable way (for example, as part of the Government's midata programme), innovative applications will offer much, much more. The Department for Business Innovation and Skills, which is running the midata programme, supported the Hackathon to get a flavour of just what kind of innovations the future could hold.

The data used in the hackathon…

So what trends will take shape in 2012 as the control shift continues in this era of consumer empowerment?

Consumers will continue to assert their ‘voice’ harnessing social media to organise themselves and share information. This level of active participation as people engage more vocally with organisations and each other is likely to grow and increase in momentum.

Using technology people will connect and collaborate in new ways causing disruption to established order. People’s shopping habits will continue the trend from ‘bricks’ to better-informed ‘clicks’. Consumers will be more active and demanding in their relationships with businesses; ‘I like this’ or…

So much has happened and changed in 2011 and the control shift is well underway. We've captured below some of the significant milestones that have unfolded this year with links to the relevant news items taken from our Market Watch.

Consumer empowerment

Consumer habits are rapidly changing driven by technology and use of social media. Consumers are becoming hyper connected and active participants in markets and they are recognising the power of acting collectively (think Occupy London). They are changing their shopping habits: according to Reevoo’s research nearly 90% of respondents would not purchase a product before reading others’…

We're now planning our next research reports and we'd like your input.

We're already committed to two reports (see below) and would like to choose two more from the options list. Feedback very welcome.

Privacy comparisons. Which of the top 100 e-commerce e-tailers has the best privacy policy and which has the worst?

Decision-making market. As a follow-on from our work on personal information management services (PIMS), we look at the broad scope of suppliers in this market and chart what benefits consumers get from making better decisions.

Options for early 2012 -

The Personal Data Store (PDS) market.…

Playing down good news isn’t something one expects from politicians these days, but there’s at least one real driver for growth buried in George Osborne’s Autumn Statement. In it he announced new Open Data measures, and this signals a battery of initiatives that will present new and exciting opportunities to outperform our decreased growth forecast. According to the Cabinet Office the measures will, ‘open up public sector data to make travel easier and healthcare better, and create significant growth for industry and jobs in the UK.’ More Open Data will ‘allow entrepreneurs to develop useful applications for business and consumers’.…

At our recent event ‘To hoard or to share: midata and the personal data-sharing revolution’ Alan Mitchell discussed the Government’s midata programme in the broader context of changes to the personal data landscape. We’ve now published a report on the New Personal Data Landscape that identifies these transformational trends, highlights the emerging market for new personal data management services and analyses the opportunities and threats for organisations.

For the last fifty years organisations have had a monopoly on the collection and use of customer data. But this is changing. Individuals are starting to collect and manage their…

Many of you familiar with our work will have heard us use the phrase "tipping point"; and one of these may well have emerged with Facebook Gestures - as one commentator put it Prepare for the Oversharing Explosion. Well, we think we've reached a smaller one, albeit still significant, in our business - it is time to expand! It's exciting and you may be able to help us.

First up, we're after two business development professionals. And no, we're not using BDM as a euphemism for sales. We need two people who can listen carefully to our clients'…

We're now planning our Autumn research programme and are looking for input on the top three projects and some suggestions for what we should cover in early 2012.

October - PIMS 2 - the personal information management market

This report is about the market that changes markets - how third party vendors are helping consumers work across markets.

Building on Ctrl-Shift’s 2010 initial foray into this market, the report is focused on how services are being built to allow consumers to keep information about themselves in one easy to manage place. The report will include updates on Mint, MoneyStrands, Google…

Over the next few weeks I’m going to do a series of short blogs exploring a gear change in the way markets work, triggered by one aspect of the control shift: the unfolding consumer decision-making revolution.

The bottom line is this. For the last hundred years or so, commercial activities have been organised around identifying and meeting peoples’ consumption needs, via markets for products and services.

Now however, a new level of economic activity is emerging around another set of consumer needs: their decision-making needs – needs that, for the most part, have largely been ignored and which therefore remain…

Two years ago, McKinsey reported on a multi-category, multi country research project which showed that in the face of exploding product choices and digital channels, the increasing need for two way conversations with consumers and "the emergence of an increasingly discerning, well-informed consumer", marketing strategies that rely on "influencing customers by relying solely on one-way, push advertising" were losing traction.

They’ve just revisited this research and report that “this evolution has only accelerated” as consumers go online to social networks, blogs, review forums etc “to quench their thirst for objective advice about products”.

McKinsey draw one important…

We are setting out to track the ‘control shift’ through a tracking survey that will, over time, provide evidence of which changes are unnfolding, where, at what pace, with what impacts and implications. Our initial research is now available and it sets a benchmark to track that progress.

The research is based on a GB representative sample of nearly 1500 consumers surveyed in April 2011. Fieldwork was conducted between 28 April and 5 May 2011, with 1464 adults responding.

After the raw data was collated (data tables are available), Ctrl-Shift analysed the data to draw its conclusions. The analysis looks…

A new EU-wide research survey published in April 2011, has shown that the UK lags behind many other countries according to a consumer empowerment index. The research revealed that less than 50% of the 56,000 respondents (in 29 countries answering 70 questions) felt confident, knowledgeable and protected as consumers.

The European Commission said that the "results show that consumer awareness and skills are worryingly low. However, there is a considerable potential to empower consumers and thereby to improve consumer welfare and reduce consumer detriment. The internet and the media have a key role to play in…

The Government’s new programme 'Better Choices: Better Deals' represents a significant acceleration in the trend towards consumer empowerment. They even call it a ‘Consumer Empowerment Strategy’. We’ve prepared a mydata briefing on what this means for organisations. It’s free!

The announcement is a first on two fronts:

1) Its ‘mydata’ programme encourages companies to release data they hold about individuals back to them, so that they can use this data for their own purposes. This is the first major Government initiative, globally, towards a changed personal data consensus: personal data is a personal asset, and individuals should have…

We're still progressing our thinking on how to provide the consumer side of the evidence of the control shift. Thanks to those who commented on the original (either on site or via email). We are now close to our final questions (see below). We're looking to get these out on a survey before Easter and reporting back at our Explorers' Club in May.
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Our Questions:

Trend: information as a tool in the hands of the individual (decision-making)

1. When making a non-routine purchase, the first thing I do is seek out independent information…

We're about to start our longest ever project - one that we think will take us to 2020 and maybe beyond. And we need your help.

We're setting out on a simple task: to track the change in control from provider to buyer. Much has already happened but much more is still to come. We want to be able to provide evidence of that change. We're already looking at what companies are doing and how their behaviours and practices are changing.

Now it is time for the consumer or buyer to have their say. We're going to be running a…

40 Ways to Engage with your Customers

People use the words ‘Customer Engagement’ to mean all sorts of things, so we talked to a wide range of businesses to see what's actually happening.

Something more profound than just channel change is happening. New, digital, ways of engaging with customers are:

bypassing traditional gatekeepers to customers such as retailers and media owners,
creating new, direct connections with customers for brands previously without a direct customer relationship,
opening up opportunities to add new forms of value for customers,
creating simultaneous opportunities for organisations to elicit valuable information from…

We've been researching the market for personal data stores as a key component of the changing market. But we realised in January that we were partly looking for the wrong thing. Staring us right in the face was the emergence of a "new" consumer service - personal information management services, PIMS. Examples of PIMS being launched just this month are Lloyds' Money Manager and a similar idea being announced by Confused.com.

Our report shows the power of PIMS to shift the balance of control, trust and value towards consumers and away from producers, vendors and service providers is inexorable –…

Thanks to the DMA for an excellent conference on 16 March. We were speaking - more on that anon - but also being a delegate, it was a chance to listen. It seemed as though there are two audiences. First up are the marketers - who were interested in how they could better use data they already have. Second were the compliance officers, who seemed more interested in protecting their asset. There was some sense that the two groups have reached a concordat - what is that we can get away with yet stay on the right side of the…

Whenever marketers use the word ‘customer’ or ‘consumer’ they bury themselves deep within an organisation-centric view of the world: these terms are seller-centric inventions.

The only entities that see ‘customers’ or ‘consumers’ when they look at the world are organisations trying to sell stuff. When marketers talk about customers and consumers, they are not talking about the world ‘out there’ as it really exists, they are looking into a mirror reflecting their own internal obsessions back to them.

A customer is someone who buys what we sell. When the organisation looks at ‘the customer’ it is just looking at ‘what…

An industrial age view of value focuses all attention on products and services: how to make them, how to distribute them, how to sell them. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just not the full picture.

Now a second market is emerging over and above and alongside this industrial age market. It is the market for 'better decisions' - for information and services that 'help me make, and implement, better decisions'. This market works according to its own logic, delivering its own value. How it works has a huge bearing on how the first market works.

Right now, for example,…

Our next research theme is the many ways in which consumers, customers and citizens are changing the way they make decisions. That's obviously driven by new technologies, but there's another aspect we cannot ignore - a steady stream of revelations as to how human beings make decisions in the first place.

We've just published a Ctrl-Shift 'Heads Up' outlining some of the issues raised by these new discoveries. For an eight point summary click here, and for the full discussion click here.

The bottom line? Far from ushering in a new era of control, where organisations use their…

I’ve just outlined an agenda to ‘reinvent marketing’ in my Marketing magazine blog.

Its key points are as follows.

First, there’s a win-win at the heart of marketing: when organisations apply knowledge and resources to supply individuals with products and services that are better quality and/or cheaper than these individuals can provide for themselves.

But then there’s an additional layer of persuasion, where things start to get adversarial. Unfortunately, a lot of time, effort and money ends up getting invested in this adversarial side of marketing. Its underlying features are:

Goal Marketers’ job is to help their organisations make…