Ctrl-Shift - Understanding Consumer Empowerment

In this issue we highlight our forthcoming reports each of which delivers fresh insight into emerging markets. Also covered are some suggestions drawn from our recent research about what constitutes best practice in building positive, two-way data sharing customer relationships. The market round-up includes some of the key news this month.

Understanding growth markets

Over the next few months our research is focused on some of the new market opportunities emerging as a result of developments in the empowered consumer marketplace. Two new reports will provide evidence and analysis of the implications and possibilities created by developments across these different…

I have to say, I’m puzzled by the reaction so far to the EU proposed new regulations for data protection.

There’s been a lot of debate about a proposed new ‘right to be forgotten’. However, from what I read of the actual draft legislation, the ifs and buts of this new right mean its real impact could be pretty limited. There’s considerable corporate hand-wringing about the penalties for breaking the new law, but the proposed maximum fines would only apply to the most flagrant violations and be tested in the courts.

Hand-ringing about the cost of implementation is more interesting:…

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…

Just come across the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee’s report on Government’s use of IT. Entitled “recipe for rip-offs: time for a new approach” it covers lots of things but one in particular struck my eye.

Here are its conclusions on the specific issue of Personal Data Ownership.

“Giving control of personal data to the individual has the potential to improve data quality while reducing both costs and risks. Individuals are used to controlling their own data with private sector companies, such as Amazon and with utility companies.
Moving to a model where the citizen maintains…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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:
 

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…

I’ve just been reading the World Economic Forum’s report Personal Data: The Emergence of New Asset Class.

Here are some of the key points in the report.  First, it highlights the vast amounts of personal data that are now being generated and that this data (‘digital data created by and about people’) “is generating a new wave of opportunity for economic and societal value creation.”

It continues: “Increasing the control that individuals have over the manner in which their personal data is collected, managed and shared will spur a host of new services and applications. As some…

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…

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…

Great day out at an event run by the helpful people at Telco2.0. The key issue under discussion were the future business models for the telco industry and one of the main themes was customer data.

The core of that discussion was that Telcos collect a lot of customer data and the issue was how that could be exploited?! Hmm not a great starting point. However the presentation from Phil Laidler, a Telco2.0 director and analyst, that followed certainly caused discussion. The presentation was based on a group discussion of about 40 people organised by Telco2.0 on…

I’ve nicked the following extracts from a report by Neil Davey at mycustomer.com.

Of course we’ve been saying this sort of stuff for years. But it’s good that people like Gartner are finally getting round to recognising it: it shows which way the wind is blowing.

“Kicking off the London Summit, Gartner VP Steve Prentice painted a daunting portrait of the sector, describing how issues relating to data, reputation, trust and customer empowerment are all undermining CRM efforts. In short, customer relationship management’s days may be numbered, he said, as a new age of ‘customer managed relationships’ begins.
"Among the…

Interest in the trend towards Volunteered Personal Information seems to be gathering pace.

To see our recent presentation at the IDM Data Council on VPI, click here.

To be honest we weren’t that surprised at the results of our recent research: for all the talk about consumer empowerment most consumers don’t feel that empowered … yet.

Does that mean ‘the trend towards increased consumer empowerment’ is all hype? I don’t think so. I think it means we need to dig deeper into what ‘consumer empowerment’ actually looks like, and how (and therefore) where it is unfolding.

The first level is choice. The classic arena of choice is between competing products and services. More recently however, consumers have also gained much greater choice over the sources of…

Last night, eloquently supported by William Heath, I gave a master class on Volunteered Personal Information for the IDM (Institute of Direct Marketing).

My concluding summary was:

•    We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century tipping point in the information flows in our society: from ‘top down’ (organisation to individual) to ‘bottom up’ (individuals to organisations and each other).
•    Marketing as we know it was constructed around the assumptions and operational requirements of ‘top down’.
•    Most of its current problems and constraints are a by-product of this heritage.
•    In the course of organising…