Doc Searls stands up for a lot of stuff that I could take issue with today in a lengthy interview with Shel Israel. I’ll just pick on one thing. Doc says,
VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management. It’s the reciprocal of Customer Relationship Management, which is the field that has been devoted to customer entrapment for far too long, and which has borne nearly the full weight of “relating” to customers — and entirely on terms supplied by vendors. Customers need to be able to set terms as well, and to relate in ways that work for both sides.
Now what is that about? CRM is a humongus corporation managing its marketing and products by aggregating sales, supply, and marketing relationship data of customers sliced and diced a million different ways. CRM is 1:1000000, so the reciprocal of that is 1000000:1 and that implies organization of customers, like cooperative buying, like unions. But Doc is a big-time bourgeois individualist, a self-reliance kind of guy, so VRM is likely not really about a reciprocal to CRM. Later in the interview he clarifies further,
In general tools that increase freedom and choice are what matter. The ones I care about are the ones we’re working on with ProjectVRM. They have to do with independent individual-controlled identity and the ability to express preferences, choices and demand, across whole markets rather than just within vendor silos. I see CRM as we understand it now — ways to own and manage the creatures called consumers changing utterly once VRM comes along. I believe this will change business itself, and markets along with it.
What was it Henry Ford said? You can get any color you want as long as it’s black? Identity is identity, why… it’s almost tautological! Many on the web would protect and preserve their privacy through anonymity, but underlying that anonymity, that pseudonymity is a real identity that is tied to a real entity. So I still don’t get ProjectVRM, what it’s trying to accomplish, what entities it will ultimately benefit. I think Doc’s use of “reciprocal” implies “reciprocity;” but I don’t see how I, a lonely little consumer of (for example) Kraft products have a lot to say to them all by myself about toning down the dayglo orange color of their boxed mac and cheese dinners.
Now perhaps along with the communications revolution that we’ve brought to the world with our little network, there is also waiting in the wings a manufacturing and distribution revolution that will play into these VRM dreams. Some mash-up of Just In Time manufacturing of consumables and Fed-ex… If we’re agile we’ll deliver the network that addresses those supply-side changes as the market evolves to feed our individual demands for unique products and personal and private service. Maybe then I’ll be able to anonymously order up a dayglo orange Ford Model T and a case of black enamel colored mac and cheez.
[tags]burger king, VRM, Doc Searls[/tags]
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