Ctrl-Shift - Understanding Consumer Empowerment

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…

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…

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…

Instead of establishing a huge, centralised National Identity Scheme, the Government wants to establish a decentralised market of competing private sector identity providers. Each will provide an identity assurance service, so that public sector and other providers can be confident of the identity of the person they are dealing with. For some organisations, the Identity Assurance Programme offers a straightforward business opportunity to become an Identity Provider.

Ctrl-Shift's briefing on this new programme reveals that if the new approach works it should bring three major benefits:

• Reduced risk and lower costs for both organisations and individuals via standardised processes…

The Ctrl-Shift Explorers' Club met on May 12 to share experiences and understanding of the changing consumer market place. It was an eclectic mix. Attendees included large corporations and small businesses; public and private sectors; different vertical markets; and suppliers of marketing services and the creators of some of the new tools available to consumers.

The event had plenty of time for discussion around a number of topics we've been researching including

The Government’s ‘mydata’ initiative - what the paper says, what the implications are, and what companies should do to take advantage of the hidden radicalism in this…

The May newsletter covers the Government's mydata, a Europe wide assessment of consumer empowerment, a market round-up and to plug your chance to meet the Control Shift team next week.
The Government’s mydata initiative - covered in our last newsletter -  is moving to its next stage. We’re glad to announce that Ctrl-Shift will be working with Department of Business Innovation and Skills as a member of the Project Board to set up the programme of work and make the strategy a reality.

The initiative aims to encourage companies holding customer data to release the data back…

Today the Government launched its new Better Choices: Better Deals Consumer Empowerment strategy, of which Mydata is a key part.

Mydata is an initiative to encourage businesses to release data back to individuals in a portable re-usable way - so that the data becomes a useful resource for the individual as well as for the company.

This is a landmark move towards personal information empowerment.  Ctrl-Shift attended a special Roundtable at No 10 Downing Street as part of the consultations around this proposal. I was asked to give a short presentation. Here is what I said:
 

What does the phrase 'consumer empowerment' mean to you?

Depending who you are it may seem like a threat, or 'about time too'; or a 'trend' to be observed. Right now however, very few people see it as a business opportunity.

That needs to change, because empowering consumers is probably one of the biggest opportunities for innovation and growth we've seen for decades. We (Ctrl-Shift) have just published a report which begins to outline the scale of this opportunity.

Called 'Personal Information Management Services - A Market Poised to Disrupt', the report makes this simple observation: everyone wants to…

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 –…

I have just written an article for MyCustomer.com (http://bit.ly/csMJvr) about the emotional drivers of consumer empowerment.

Here's the gist: There's a growing bank of psychological research showing that feeling empowered and in control makes people feel good about themselves (self-esteem, hope, being energised to achieve stuff) and that feeling disempowered and not in control is associated with depression and ill-health. Common sense really, but the boffins are uncovering the details, mechanisms and so on.

Meanwhile, the democratisation of information technologies is empowering individuals in all sorts of ways.

In the article I talk about five 'waves' of consumer…

Our new report on Volunteered Personal Information (VPI) is based on our previous analysis of the evolution of ‘consumer empowerment’.

Basically, we can see four distinct phases of empowerment.

Phase 1: choice – the ability to choose between products and services
Phase 2: choice – the ability to choose between different sources of information
Phase 3: decision-making – the ability to process information from different sources to make (and implement) better decisions
Phase 4: voice (or VPI) – the ability to share the information generated in the course of my decision-making processes with other parties…