Last night, eloquently supported by my colleague William Heath, I gave a master class on Volunteered Personal Information for the IDM (Institute of Direct Marketing). My concluding summary was: • We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century tipping point...

From what I can see, CRM can never deliver its hoped-for benefits because of a series of intrinsic, structural flaws in the ways it gathers and uses personal data. In the new digital environment, I suspect marketers are going to have to recalibrate and...

So here’s the agenda for reinventing marketing I promised a while ago. First off, we need to recognise the core. Organisations apply knowledge and resources to supply individuals with products and services that are better quality and/or cheaper than these...

If you had to answer the question ‘where is the natural home for knowledge about the customer?’ what would you answer? OK. This is a bit simplistic but it’s also fundamental. The natural home for knowledge about supply is the supplier, and the natural...

There’s another interesting thing about the book buying data example I talked about in my last blog : by definition, the information you need to get insight into your customer’s overall book buying activities can never be generated via the transactions...

In my last two posts I talked about two different sources of volunteered personal information: ‘ my head ’ (e.g. my future purchasing plans, my attitudes or beliefs) and ‘the things I do’, which are now increasingly captured via my digital slug trail...

My last post on Volunteered Personal Information only told half the story. It focused on the information individuals could actively volunteer, if they wanted to. The other half is the information we generate automatically, whether we like it or not. Back...

OK, rant about marketing fads over. The point I’m really trying to make is that online social networking is just one small sub-set of a vast new continent of possibility: Volunteered Personal Information (VPI). It’s the big picture of VPI, not just one...

From my research into Volunteered Personal Information (VPI) I think it is, for most marketers, most of the time. I wrote about VPI in Marketing Magazine last week. The underlying observation is that individuals are increasingly using digital/Internet...

When I was writing my Marketing Magazine article on Volunteered Personal Information I tried as hard as I could to avoid the dreaded ‘P’ word – ‘paradigm’. But in the end I couldn’t because, ultimately, that’s what we are talking about: a paradigm change...

When we say making and implementing decisions is the epicentre of consumer value, there’s one thing we need to be clear about. This is not – definitely not – a claim that somehow ‘consumers are changing’ in some fundamental, revolutionary way. Quite the...

OK, I’m jumping ahead now, but I need to address the question asked in my last post. If individuals only really buy marketing that adds value from their point of view, can we define this value? If we shake off industrial age assumptions (that value is...