Doc Searls - The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge

Work on this book started in March 2006, when I was covering OReillys Emerging Technologies (eTech) conference in San Diego for Linux Journal. The conference theme was The Attention Economy. Sitting in the audience taking notes, I thought, Why build an economy around attention, when intention is where the money comes from? So I wrote an article, on the spot, titled, The Intention Economy. An excerpt:

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 dont need advertising to make them

The Intention Economy is built around truly open markets, not a collection of silos. In the Intention Economy, customers dont have to fly from silo to silo, like a bees from flower to flower, collecting deal info (and unavoidable hype) like so much pollen. In The Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyers purchase. Simple as that

The Intention Economy is about buyers finding sellers, not sellers finding (or capturing) buyers.

In The Intention Economy, a car rental customer should be able to say to the car rental market, Ill be skiing in Park City from March 2025. I want to rent a 4-wheel drive SUV. I belong to Avis Wizard, Budget FastBreak and Hertz One Club. I dont want to pay up front for gas or get any insurance. What can any of you companies do for me?and have the sellers compete for the buyers business.

Positive buzz followed, but development didnt, and thats what the Intention Economy needed. So, several months later, when I was given a fellowship at Harvard Universitys Berkman Center for Internet & Society, I decided to launch a development project toward making the Intention Economy happen. We called it ProjectVRM.

VRM stood for vendor relationship managementthe customer-side counterpart of CRM, or customer relationship management, a business that appears to most of us in the form of junk mail and call centers. ProjectVRMs goal was to cause development of tools that would make individuals both independent of vendors and better able to engage with them. In other words, to fix a broken system from the customer side by developing a new system complementary to existing businesses and built on the natural independence and agency of human beings.

Behind ProjectVRM was a thesis:

Free customers are more valuable than captive ones.

And, as a corollary,

Free markets require free customers.

Since CRM was already a multibillion-dollar business category, ProjectVRM was a highly ambitious undertaking. But I was neither alone nor early. In the United Kingdom, Iain Henderson, Alan Mitchell, and others had already started the Buyer Centric Commerce Forum and were doing work on what they called personal data storesan essential VRM tool. Adriana Lukas, also in the U.K., had similar goals for both her consultancy and her blogging company, and was encouraging development work as well. The digital identity development community had also been working on some of the same problems, encouraged by the twice-yearly Internet Identity Workshops (IIWs), which Kaliya Hamilin, Phil Windley, and I started in 2005.

At Berkman, ProjectVRM consisted of myself, a mailing list, a blog, a wiki, and gatherings in the form of meetings and workshops. It still does. Out in the world, however, it has grown to consist of dozens of development efforts and hundreds of individuals, all working in their own ways to create tools that liberate customers and build the Intention Economy. This book is a progress report on that work and the evolving ideas behind it.