Editor's Note: The following is a version of the March 30th edition of Doc Searls' SuitWatch newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

I rent a lot of cars. One reason for this is I travel a lot, mostly to conferences and meetings in other cities. Another reason is my own car, a late-80s Subaru wagon (the exact model year is a mystery not worth solving), can't be trusted on long trips. Also, its roof leaks.

So, I'm a veteran car rental customer. Because I'm also a veteran airline passenger whose most frequent flying has been to cities served heavily by United Airlines--Denver, Chicago, Washington, New York--I belong to a high, though not the highest, frequent flier caste in United's Mileage Plus system. So, when I go to car rental agency sites, I usually enter through United's portal, which tells the agencies to give me a few extra miles.

Mostly I rent from Budget, mostly for one reason: I have at least some chance of renting the only compact rental car I like, the Ford Focus. I like it for two reasons: 1) it's a fun car to drive and 2) its radio plays MP3 CDs, which lets me listen to podcasts when I'm driving. So does the Ford Fusion, by the way, which is an excellent "intermediate" upgrade from the Focus. I recently enjoyed driving one of those from my home in Santa Barbara to San Francisco and back. I got the Fusion after rejecting the only Focus on the lot; the power outlet didn't work, and I needed the outlet to recharge my cell phone. As it happened, it was the same Focus I had rejected a couple of weeks earlier for the same reason. When I asked why it hadn't been fixed, the person behind the counter explained that the problem "doesn't effect the rentability of the car", and so there were no plans to fix it at all. But she had mercy on me and gave me the Fusion for the same price, telling me "You'll like it, believe me". And she was right.

And I guess that's another reason I like to rent from Budget, at least in Santa Barbara. The people behind the counter know me and always have been good to me.

Unfortunately, the same doesn't go for the random counters I avoid at airports elsewhere. The instrument of my avoidance is the on-line rental gauntlet at each agency's Web site, which differ as little as their airline counters. Hertz, Avis, Alamo, National, Budget, Dollar and Thrifty are seven brands of vanilla. Within each brand is a CRM (customer relationship management) system that limits your choices to a portfolio of marketing traps and come-ons that are meant to manage far more than to relate. Each agency's CRM is a silo meant to trap and hold customers and shake them down for as many pennies as possible. Some club memberships, such as Budget's FastBreak, allow you to "rent my favorite car" and bypass the insurance and tank-o-gas upsell at the counter. That's nice, I suppose, except that it barely works, if at all.

Isn't it amazing that we're in our seventh year of the new millennium, and the on-line car rental experience still sucks rocks? And that the human experience at the counter is little if any different than it was five, ten, fifteen years ago?

Of course, I've been carping about this for a long time. But lately, some people have been asking me for details. Not only do they want to know What Goes Wrong but What Can Be Done to fix it.

So I've been taking screenshots of my car rental experiences. The other night I posted an annotated tour of them on the Linux-based Flickr. You can find them here.

Now, I could say more about how lame and useless these agencies are. But that would be too easy, and it would miss the larger screw-up, which is the economy itself.

The car rental example is one of a marketing economy, not a market economy. A marketing economy is one in which marketing "manages", "owns" and otherwise controls the "behavior" of customers whose choices are so limited that they are known only as "consumers". A market economy is one in which buyers and sellers are both autonomous and independent and are free to make all kinds of choices. The two economies are very different.

The problem is, we've been in a marketing economy for so long that we think it's natural, not just normal. That's why so many of us--even certified economists--continue to believe a free market is "your choice of silo", each of which is designed more to trap customers than to serve them.

To borrow the language of geology, marketing economies flourished in the Mass Marketing period of the Industrial Era, both of which now are coming to an end. Comparably, tyrannosaurs flourished in the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic era, both of which came to an end when a meteor smacked into the Yucatan and changed everything.

The meteor that ended the Mass Marketing period and the Industrial Era was the Internet. But instead of setting the old world on fire and killing off species, the Net gave every living thing a better world in which to do business and make culture. In pure business terms, the networked world is far better suited for markets than for marketing.

Back on March 8, I posted "The Intention Economy", which has topped this Web site's "Today's popular content" list pretty much since it published. I wrote the piece in response to lip-service given to the "attention economy" at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference (eTech). Too much of it seemed to be about butchering consumer cattle and serving their eyeballs for hors d'oeuvres. It did this rather than respecting the fact that we're way overdue for the emergence of a real market economy in the best environment ever built for one. Namely, the Net.

Between eTech and PC Forum--which I missed this year, having been recruited to speak at SXSW in Austin--Esther Dyson pointed to "The Intention Economy" and wrote:

She also wrote:

I love the term "insincere businesses". She nails it there and in the line about giving individuals due respect. But in what context?

Here's how I put it in "The Intention Economy":

What I tried to do there is isolate, or factor out, marketing. I wanted to restrict sell-side concern to serving customers with an actual intention to buy. In the case I detailed in that screenshot series, we had a ready customer, with real money, who failed to make a purchase at either of the silos (Budget and Avis) in which he holds actual memberships. In other words, even the damn traps didn't work. Alamo got the business because it answered demand with supply, at a price about half of what all the others were charging.

In the language of Steve Gillmor, I made a series of failed gestures followed by one that worked. Steve may differ in his interpretation, but I have a feeling that the Gesture Economy and the Intention Economy are pretty much the same. They're both about getting marketing out of the way so markets can actually work.

In addition to receiving some excellent comments about "The Intention Economy", I had a nice exchange with Jordan Rule, whose blog is Genuine Incorporated. Here's what I said in an e-mail:

I also said I thought there was a good chance The Answer would emerge from the growing conversation around identity. Some amazing things are happening right now in the midst of the Identity Gang, an informal group lightly organized by Harvard's Berkman Center that anybody can join. We have two conferences coming up, and I invite anyone interested to come and participate. The first is the Internet Identity Workshop, which will be held in Silicon Valley, May 2-3. The second will be held at Harvard Law School, June 19-21 (details pending).

Meanwhile, watch your intentions. One of these days the market, with no assistance from marketing, might just fulfill them.