Marketing vs. Intention

Editor's Note: The following is a version of the March 30th edition of Doc Searls' SuitWatch newsletter. Click here [1] 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 [2].

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" [3], 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 [4] pointed to "The Intention Economy" and wrote:

Doc Searls rightly blogged that most of what people are talking about when they say "attention" is in fact (purchasing) intention. From the marketers' point of view, there is indeed a desire to get attention and to transform that into monetizable intention.

She also wrote:

In fact, the new world is one of insincere businesses (even ones made up of sincere individuals) trying to figure out how to listen to--really listen, not just collect data from--their customer. From some pundits' point of view, heartless businesses are finally being forced to give individuals due respect.

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":

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 don't need advertising to make them.
The Intention Economy is about markets, not marketing. You don't need marketing to make Intention Markets.
The Intention Economy is built around truly open markets, not a collection of silos. In The Intention Economy, customers don't have to fly from silo to silo, like 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 buyer's purchase. Simple as that.
The Intention Economy is built around more than transactions. Conversations matter. So do relationships. So do reputation, authority and respect. Those virtues, however, are earned by sellers (as well as buyers) and not just "branded" by sellers on the minds of buyers like the symbols of ranchers burned on the hides of cattle.
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, "I'll be skiing in Park City from March 20-25. I want to rent a 4-wheel drive SUV. I belong to Avis Wizard, Budget FastBreak and Hertz 1 Club. I don't 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 buyer's business.

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 [5], 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 [6]. Here's what I said in an e-mail:

I think what's missing on the sell side is the perception of the customer as fully empowered--partly because sellers are too used to seeing customers merely as consumers, or as transient sources of cash; and partly because customers in fact still are not yet fully empowered, because too many of the power cards are held by sellers or intermediaries.
For a customer to become fully empowered, we need to work out a number of problems in a general area we call identity, but which really needs a less loaded term.
The fully empowered customer is a collection of qualitative and quantitative facts about the buyer that may be relevant at either of the two other levels present in a sale, in addition to the transaction. Those levels are conversation and relationship. I am more likely to rent a car, say, from Budget than Thrifty, if conversational lines are open and there is a known and useful relationship (such as with a club membership... but it can go beyond that, to transaction history and relationships with partners such as airlines) with Budget. Right now too many conversations and relationships are siloed inside the seller's CMS (customer "relationship" management system), requiring the customer to go from one silo to the next, with little or no data persistence along the way.

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 [7], 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 [8], 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.