Ctrl-Shift - Understanding Consumer Empowerment

It has been a busy month where we have attended and hosted several events. They highlight the way that public opinion, technology, regulatory and commercial pressures are all lining up to unleash a sea change in the personal data landscape. What’s also becoming clear is that the UK is leading the world in giving individuals control over their data. In this issue we’ll tell you about these events, our new research and a smattering of market news.

A £1bn opportunity?

Our latest research (to be published on Monday April 30) is a comprehensive review of all the players in the…

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…

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…

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…

The following article by William Heath appeared in the new Demos book The long view - new ideas for progressive policy.

The UK government has made good progress in how it handles public data such as facts about public finances and statistics. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of its handling of personal data and identity management.

On public data, the Power of Information review made the powerful case that public data should, by default, be free. The economic benefit from using the data for potential new services far outweighs any benefit from selling such information — and…

Two more articles explore the on-going control shift.

The first article comes from McKinsey and discusses the effects of word-of-mouth on marketing. The article starts off thus:

“The sheer volume of information available today has dramatically altered the balance of power between companies and consumers. As consumers have become overloaded, they have become increasingly skeptical about traditional company-driven advertising and marketing and increasingly prefer to make purchasing decisions largely independent of what companies tell them about products.
This tectonic power shift toward consumers reflects the way people now make purchasing decisions ….”

Unfortunately, the rest of the…

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…

Smart Healthcare has just published an article by me about health records, opposition policy and the role of VRM.
The emergence of person-centric health records, imperfect as they may yet be, suggests that healthcare may be the first sector to get this right. The NHS provides an interesting paper-based precedent for this: the red book of maternity and infant records which is held by parents. Anyone who has used them know how well they work and how carefully parents look after them.

Now imagine electronic tools many times more powerful – although no more powerful than your office…

VRM took a great leap towards becoming HM Loyal Opposition official policy today with the publication of a CPS paper by Liam Maxwell: "It's ours - Why we, not government, must own our data"

Essentially it's the first-ever VRM manifesto for government IT (if you don't count my GC talk last month or blog post here in April). As Maxwell sets it out:
A clear choice is emerging for the future of government IT:
− Either to continue with the Transformational Government
agenda. This relies on the State holding, in the words of the