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Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Making the Way for Intention 
| | [Note: I also wrote this post in some hope that it might be good food for discussion at PC Forum, where "user in charge" is the theme.] |
| | The best, IMHO, probably Doc's notion of the "intention economy"; but even this has a fatal flaw: it squares the marketing circle nearly bringing us back to the much-loved/much-loathed "persuasion", and it¹s logical consequences are nasty things like focus groups and intrusion wars. |
| | Attention is not intention; nor should it be, because intention leaves a huge gap open for heavy-handed, ham-fisted, marketing 1.0 style "persuasion" (that¹s when marketers begin thinking they should try to change your intention...) |
| | It took me a while to grok Umair's critique, but then the light bulb flashed on — an intention economy only works if most people know precisely what their intentions ARE. And because most people DON¹T generally know what they want with any degree of precision, an intention economy is prone to marketing 1.0 inefficiencies. |
| | I believe I failed to make my own definition of intention clear enough when I wrote this passage that both men quoted: |
| | The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You don¹t need advertising to make them. |
| | The Intention Economy is about markets, not marketing. You don¹t need marketing to make Intention Markets. |
| | My point there was about what happens after minds are made up. |
| | Doc is right that Google search advertising is inherently inefficient — but NOT just because advertising is inherently efficient. Advertising that is target based on "intention" is inefficient because human "intention" is inherently inefficient |
| | There is nothing "inefficient" about intention itself. Having money and being ready to spend it is a market condition: a state of pure and ready potentiality on the buy side. The points I made in that essay about the "intention market" are about what supply does to satisfy ready demand, on an individual basis. Not about what anybody does to help make up a buyer's mind. |
| | Right now we don't have much of an intention market. Marketing is too busy trying to capture and control the customers it insults with misleading synonyms, just like it was when Cluetrain said this in 1999: |
| | we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp.
deal with it. |
| | Today sales is still busy hustling new business rather than satisfying business standing right there — business that should be much more manifest in a fully networked marketplace. |
| | An intention economy is one that brings to buyers the goods they want, when and how they want them, when they are ready to buy, thanks to networked market efficiencies. |
| | I'm not sure we'll ever have it, frankly. |
| | But I am sure marketing won't get us there, because it's not who buyers address with their demands. They're addressing sales. |
| | Here's why: Sales is real. Marketing is bullshit. (Follow that link to find out why.) |
| | To get real, marketing has to get out of the bullshit business. And it can't do that while it isn't touching customers. To touch customers, marketing has to solve a political problem with sales, which is the main corporate organ tasked with touching customers directly. As I said in that last link, threre's a good reason why VPs of Sales & Marketing tend to come from Sales. |
| | I have no idea how to help marketing with that political problem. I do have some ideas about how to make the intention economy happen, however. They all involve independent identity. And they don't involve marketing. |
| | As for what comes before customers (not "consumers", which are degraded forms of customers that exist only in the heads of marketers and customers borrowing the vocabulary of marketers) are ready to buy — when they're making up their minds — Umair and Scott make a lot of good points. |
| | I just wanted to make clear that actual intention, where customers know what they want, is still not satisfied in a very efficient way, even in a Web 2.0 world, whatever that is. |
| | A final thought, leveraging Ted Turner's famous "lead, follow or get out of the way" imperative: In an intention economy, buyers lead, sellers follow and marketing gets out of the way. |
Mopix
Who's on Frist
ExtraBucks
| | During the Cluetrain panel yesterday morning, Henry Copeland used the term 'exegesis'. I heard it as "ExtraJesus" and asked the crowd if the domain name was taken. |
| | Later Tara responded: it wasn't. So I just tried to buy it*, sitting here in the Starbucks at Oltorf and 35 here in Austin. (Miles from the Convention Center, by the way.) |
| | Then, between the last paragraph and this one, Macon Stokes walked up with his young son, introduced himself, told me he enjoyed the panel, and welcomed me to his personal Starbucks. |
| | I wanted to take a picture of Macon and his boy, but the camera croaked. Got a "lens error". Considering what it's been through, that's no surprise. (The sunset picture above was one of the last it took.) |
| | Still, except for that one glitch, I regard the whole thing as proof The Matrix is still working. |
| | As for the domain name, maybe AKMA has some ideas. |
| | * I gave up, after failing to get either GoDaddy or Register.com to work. Life's too short, etc. |
Proof that the handbasket to hell is a fun ride
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