The Control Shift

The Control Shift The Strategic Challenge for Organisations A Ctrl-Shift Essentials Briefing What you need to know about the Control Shift in 10 slides

Over the last hundred years, consumers have been grown increasingly empowered thanks to an explosion of choice:
extending choice into new categories (health, telephony, financial services etc)
much greater choice within categories (both a product of, and a cause of, intensifying competition)
Six Waves of Consumer Empowerment Wave 1: Product choice It’s not all hunky-dory however, because choice also brings its own costs too. It takes time, effort (and sometimes money) to gather the information you need to make a good decision. And often the choices you are presented with are more apparent than real. So increased choice has also created a demand among consumers for help in making decisions. In one sense, consumers have always been ‘empowered’. Because having a choice empowers you.

Six Waves of Consumer Empowerment Wave 2: Information choice This started with the proliferation and fragmentation of traditional media, but it really took off with the rise of the Internet and new types of information source such as independent expert reviews and price comparison sites. This reduced consumers’ dependence on marketers/’the authorities’ for their decision-making information. This trend was massively accelerated, deepened and extended by the emergence of search – which empowered individuals to choose what information they wanted to seek out and pay attention to – rather than having to sift through information that other people decide to present to them. Over the years, consumer choice extended into a qualitatively new realm: choice between different sources of information.

Six Waves of Consumer Empowerment Wave 3: Channel choice Naturally consumers chose the channels that most suited them. Brands found themselves competing as hard for access to consumers’ time, energy and attention as they were for consumers’ money. Now brands are under increasing pressure to turn every touchpoint into a source of ‘ customer ROI’: to provide the customer with a superior return on his investment of time, energy, information and attention, as well as money. Even as information choices were proliferating, so were channel choices. Consumers could now shop from a wider range of different types of retail outlet. They could interact with companies via many different ‘touchpoints’: face-to-face, via call-centres, online, via mobile phones, smart phones. This is a shift in value perspective: from products and services (i.e. things ‘done for’ the customer’) to processes. Helping customers to improve their processes.

Today, individuals have an increasing ability to:
Express their own views and opinions
Share information and experiences with each other about companies and brands (e.g. product reviews)
Volunteer types of information about context, reasons and future plans that had previously been inaccessible to organisations.
Six Waves of Consumer Empowerment Wave 4: From choice to voice Most organisations are only just beginning to grapple with these shifts. Choice is not the be-all and end-all of empowerment. The really big sea-change – a once in a millennium shift – is the addition of ‘voice’ to choice: the shift from ‘top down’ to ‘bottom-up’ information flows. VPI (Volunteered Personal Information) is a catalyst of far-reaching marketing and relationship change.

Meanwhile, advances in new technology – along with new service innovations – mean that individuals are becoming managers of their own information: gathering, storing and sharing the information they need to manage their lives better. Six Waves of Consumer Empowerment Wave 5: Individuals as information managers This is another transformational sea-change. Historically, it was organisations that gathered, collected and stored information about individuals: ‘customer data’ . This created ‘Customer Relationship Management’, where organisations ‘managed’ their customers. As individuals are empowered to manage their own data, CRM is being flipped – into VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) where customers manage their relationships with their suppliers.

A new industry of Personal Information Management Services (PIMS) is emerging to help individuals become the pivotal point of integration: gathering, using and sharing the information they need to: Six Waves of Consumer Empowerment Wave 6: Individuals as the point of value integration PIMS are becoming individuals’ first port of call when going to market. By crystallising value around each particular individual’s priorities, preferences and circumstances they disrupt the ways traditional ‘top down’ ‘push’ markets work. The industrial age was organised around economies of scale: making and selling more and more of the same thing. But to manage our lives better, individuals need to access and integrate just one or two items of many different things.
better organise and manage ongoing ‘life processes’ like ‘my money’, ‘my health’ and ‘my home’
better organise and manage ‘life events and episodes’ like ‘moving home’ or ‘getting married’ better.

Together these concurrent waves of consumer empowerment add up to the Control Shift. The Control Shift The Control Shift changes both the content and the processes of wealth creation.
BEFORE
industrial age
top down
organisation-centric
a world driven by organisations deciding what to make and how to sell it
AFTER
information age
bottom up
person-centric
a world where individuals act as specifiers of value and engagement, crystallising value around their requirements.

The Control Shift is driven by the powerful new economic logic of information logistics: getting the right information to, and from, the right person, in the right form at the right time. The Power of Information Logistics
Information logistics help you deliver exactly the right information to the right person, in the right form, at the right time.
Information logistics helps you to eliminate guesswork – and therefore waste – from every aspect of wealth creation: production, distribution, communication. It also helps to deliver relevance and appropriateness. And to make the individual the point of integration.
In other words, it’s the secret of better value at lower cost.
To work, it has to be driven by information from the individual: about who I am, and what I need/want right now.
It can only happen with and through the Control Shift
This is where society’s new wealth-creating win-wins will come from. It’s why PIMS are set to become the biggest industry in the world.

the personal information management revolution is transforming how individuals and organisations interact and relate
The Control Shift in practice
So organisations need to rethink BOTH:
‘ what we make’ – our value propositions, and
‘ how we sell it’ – how we communicate this value, and how we make it available (touchpoints, channels, etc)
The Control Shift is making itself manifest in a wide variety of ways.
a new high point of value: ‘help me make and implement better decisions’ (a better decision will lead me to a better product or service, anyway)
defining value from a new, personal perspective: in making and implementing the decisions that make up my life ‘help me improve my personal metrics’

Control Shift’s research themes A person-centric perspective on value Organisation responses Next-gen customer engagement: delivering improved customer ROI via channels, touchpoints etc. Brands as information services: Information and information-driven process ‘worth searching for, trusting, using’ The Control Shift New person-centric services and value propositions The focus of this briefing A person-centric value definition of value: ‘ Help me improve my personal metrics’ Help me improve my metrics by … ‘ Helping me make better decisions and to implement them (i.e. get stuff done) better’ Help me do the above by … ‘ Helping me gather, store and deploy information as tool in my own hands’

The Control Shift

by Ctrl Shift on Feb 22, 2011

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The Control Shift — Presentation Transcript