2020 Vision -- The Restoration of the Customer

The Age of the Customer: You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

Nearly a decade has passed since Forrester said we were entering The Age of the Customer. That is apparent and has obvious implications. But as the decade of the 2020's dawns, I call out a deeper vision -- The Restoration of the Customer -- that could bring far more fundamental changes in the coming decade.

There are two surprising turns that may be taken in this decade to restore power to customers -- one that can fundamentally change how we conduct business, and one that can fundamentally change how we collaborate.

Those turns might just begin to undo many of the ills of the industrial revolution and of the computer revolution.  Both turns center on a return to enlightened human values:

• The customer is not just a persona with a bundle of attributes that a business can learn how to manipulate, but a unique human being that has been bred since pre-history to thrive on a cooperative effort to create value and share it.
• The user is not just a a source of attention that can be engaged to be sold to advertisers, but a customer to be served what they value -- again, a cooperative effort to create value and share it.

What those paying attention see

Forrester put the basic drivers nicely (emphasis added):

In this era, digitally-savvy customers would change the rules of business, creating extraordinary opportunity for companies that could adapt, and creating existential threat to those that could not. ...It requires leaders to think and act differently – in ways that feel foreign, unfamiliar, and counter-intuitive. And honestly, it is simply hard to do. ...These dynamics will endure as new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics emerge to challenge core notions of what it means to be a company, what it means to build human capital, and what it means to compete and win.

...And, a deeper vision

Here I point to some little recognized ideas on how re-centering on value can change not only the dynamic of commerce, but also a parallel dynamic of customer value that is equally important.

• First, the commercial dynamic that Forrester describes is just the foundation for reversing how the "progress" of technology cost us the human dimension in commerce -- a dimension that we had when commerce was just the way villagers did business with one another -- with human beings on both sides of an ongoing relationship. 
• Second, we humans, as "customers" of Web services, have lost control of our experience of the world.  Our central experience of human interaction has been hijacked by platforms who "engage" us in order to profit from bombarding us with advertising and paid propaganda.

First: Back to the future of commerce

Consumers are increasingly alienated from the companies they do business with. Instead of neighbors or shopkeepers, we deal with soulless institutions that we distrust and feel abused by. That has been, increasingly, the price of productivity and material riches. But now technology has advanced far enough to restore the dimension of human values -- if we applied to do so. That does not require that we abandon the miracle of capitalism, but only that we bring it back to the marketplace of human value. Technology now makes it possible for even large faceless institutions to build human interfaces that behave with human values. That will drive institutions to interact with human in ways that are more truly human.

FairPay is a framework for centering on why and how to do that. The key is to recenter on relationships and the creation and sharing of value in ways that are tailored to each individual. Specifics on how to do that are in my FairPayZone blog, some articles written with prominent marketing scholars, and my 2016 book. Some of the best places to begin to understand this are:

• The Ghost of Pricing Future -- A Thought Experiment -- a simple vision of human value.
• The Relationship Economy -- It's All About Valuing Customer Experiences -- how the restoration begins.
• The Elements of Next-Gen Relationships and Pricing -- A Unifying Framework -- deconstructing the elements of value.
• "Risk-Free" Subscriptions to The Celestial Jukebox? -- a simpler, 80/20 step toward value based subscriptions.
• FairPay Changes the "Game" of Commerce  -- a game theory method for seeking human value in business relationships.
• ...and for those with a more scholarly bent, A Novel Revenue Architecture to Monetize Digital Goods and Pricing in Consumer Digital Markets:  A Dynamic Framework.

Second: Who does it serve? - a course correction in how we experience the world

Social media and other online content services have changed how we experience the world, including how we interact with other people. Computer-mediation began with great hopes, but now it seems we have built a Frankenstein's monster.  As growing calls for change are beginning to focus on new levels of regulation, it is not enough to regulate against specific harms. Instead we must refocus on what we want to regulate for -- who these "services" serve, and what we want these platforms to facilitate. They were supposed to make us happy and smart -- instead they are making us angry and stupid. But technology can reverse that, if we incentivize that.

We can design new architectures for our interactive media that create value for us.  The key is to recognize that each of us is an individual, and we should be able to individualize our services, mixing and matching offerings to make just the service we want for what we are doing now. The most urgent part of that is to shape our media services to give each of us what we value. The Web stated out seeking to do that, and we can return to that vision. It won't be free, but it can be affordable. And we have seen that "free" is not really affordable (because it is not really free). If we do not change direction, our democracies and our civilization will collapse. Some starting points for seeing how:

• Our Digital Platforms -- What We Want to Regulate For (Not Just Against) -- a preliminary summary of my comments at an excellent event on this theme.
• The Augmented Wisdom of Crowds: Rate the Raters and Weight the Ratings -- a vision for how social media can make us smarter and happier.
• Reverse the Biz Model! -- Undo the Faustian Bargain for Ads and Data -- why the ad model was "the original sin of the Internet."
• The Tao of Fake News -- how truth emerges from what humans value as an informed consensus.
• Architecting Our Platforms to Better Serve Us -- Augmenting and Modularizing the Algorithm -- further suggestions on designing for human values.
• Free Speech, Not Free Targeting! (Using Our Own Data to Manipulate Us) -- how this clarifies the issues in the 2020 election crisis.

(Cross-posted with my other blog, FairPayZone.)

2019 New Year's Resolution: Let's Work Together to Invent a Better 2020!

My forecast for 2019: The best way to predict the future is to invent it -- let's work together on inventing a better 2020!

We face two over-arching and related challenges, one in the world of technology, and one in the larger world of enlightened democratic society.

At the broadest level, 2019 promises to be perhaps the worst and most traumatic year in recent American history. My point is not one of politics or policy (I bite my tongue), but of our basic processes of democratic society -- how we all work together to understand the world and make decisions. We now see all to well how much harm technology has done to that -- not by itself, but as an amplifier of the worst in us.

Within that world of technology, many have come to realize that we have taken a wrong turn in building vast and deeply influential infrastructures that are sustained by advertising. That perverts the profit incentive from creating value for we the people, to exploiting us to profit advertisers. That drive for engagement and targeting inherently conflicts with the creation of real value for users and society. We seem to not even be looking very hard for any solution beyond band-aids that barely alter 1) the perverse incentives of advertising, and 2) the failing zero-sum economics of artificial scarcity.

We seem to be at a loss for how to solve these problems at either level. I suggest that is simply a failure of will, imagination, and experimentation that we can all help rectify. Many prominent thought leaders have said much the same. I list some of them, and offer creative suggestions in An Open Letter to Influencers Concerned About Facebook and Other Platforms. I hope you will read it, as well as the related material it links to.

My suggestions are more specific, actionable, and practical. That letter summarizes and links to ideas I have been developing for many years, but have taken on new urgency. They are well-supported, but as yet unproven in their full form. I can't be sure that my solutions will work, but there seems to be growing consensus that the problems are real, even if few have suggested any actionable path to solving them. (I have been a successful inventor and futurist for many decades. I have often been wrong about details of my answers, but have rarely have been far wrong about problems and issues. Very smart and well-informed people think I am on the right track here.)

But whether or not I am right about the solutions, we all have to make it a priority try to find, test, and refine the best solutions we can to confront these critical problems.

Still, few in technology, business, or government have turned from business as usual to rise to the urgent challenges we now face -- and even those who alert us to these problems seem to have few concrete strategies for effective action.

Please consider the urgency and importance of these issues at both levels, see if my suggestions or those of others resonate -- and add your voice in those directions -- or work to suggest better directions.

If we do not begin to make real progress in 2019, we may face a very dark 2020 and beyond.

If we do begin to turn this ship around, we can recharge the great promise of technology to augment our intellect and our society, and to create a new economics of abundance.

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This is cross posted from both of my blogs, FairPayZone.com and Reisman on User-Centered Media, which delve further into these issues.