making vendor relationship management work for you

MygoodEboxTM

Commercial in Confidence

Because free customers are more valuable than captive ones

Commercial in Confidence MygoodEboxTM




Choosing among AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon for

your new smartphone is like choosing where you’d like to

live under house arrest.

It’s why marketers still talk about customers as “targets”

they can “acquire”… and “lock in as if they were cattle.

Doc Searls is the author of "The Intention Economy: When

Customers Take Charge" (Harvard Business Review Press). He

also runs ProjectVRM at the Berkman Center for Internet and

Society at Harvard University.

And the customer experience?



VRM turns CRM and big data on their heads

• Vendor Relationship Management tools provide customers with the means

to bear their side of the relationship burden.

• CRM systems will no longer be alone in trying to improve the ways

companies relate to customers.

• Customers will be also be involved, as fully empowered participants, rather

than as captive followers.



So how does VRM work?

Vendor Relationship Management is based on the belief that free customers

are more valuable than captive ones — to themselves, to vendors, and to the

larger economy. To be free:

• Customers must enter relationships with vendors as independent actors.

• Customers must be the points of integration for their own data.

• Customers must have control of data they generate and gather. This

means they must be able to share data selectively and voluntarily.

• Customers must be able to assert their own terms of engagement.

• Customers must be free to express their demands and intentions

outside of any one company's control.

making vendor relationship management work for you

Marketing