Flutterby™! : VRM

I was musing a bit for the ProjectVRM mailing list.

We talk a lot about personal identity, but as I was reading through the thread on advertising, I started to wonder about how I can be better about tracking vendor identity.

In a business's CRM system, there is, if I'm a high enough value customer, a mechanism for tracking various attributes about me. But in general, it's cheaper to deal with me in aggregate, do A/B testing with a bunch of people and if I happen to be in the group that goes off and finds another vendor, oh well, we'll try again later.

So let's turn this around: What can I do to track vendor behavior? How can I reliably aggregate vendor information to be a better informed customer? In short, how can I game the vendor, the same way they're gaming me?

This started out with me just thinking about how I can, for instance, track Twitter outrage and not do business with the companies that have incredibly sexist booths at CES (which seems to be remarkably coincident with "companies that have booths at CES", but I digress). Seemed like an app that had some notion of vendor identity (and a little bit more further down on the difficulties of that) and let me track various friends responses to that vendor could be useful.

But then I started thinking about how little information I can gather as an individual, so I started brainstorming on the whole notion a little bit more.

A couple of examples of how, for example, we might turn A/B testing on its head: Does this vendor respond with a better deal if I'm aggressive and angry on the phone, or if I'm calm and reasonable? How much under their first stated price should I counter-offer? What other comps am I likely to be able to negotiate from this vendor?

Because I'm happy to volunteer that I am far more likely to be a long-term customer if you don't try "introductory pricing" games on me, and I'll give you my email address in exchange for emailed receipts, and would rather you didn't try to lure me into the store with "rewards" and weekly coupons, but all of these things are largely implemented as part of an overall store identity strategy.

Whereas if I more clearly understand the marketing and branding strategy up-front, "we sell the cheapest possible thing that can be called an X" vs "we sell a mid-range X with a large markup and lots of hand-holding", or "we have high prices but reward long-term customer relationships by making you play coupon games" vs "we have the same price for everybody", or "we're open on Sunday afternoon, and mark up appropriately" vs "we're open 7 to 5 on weekdays to sell to the contractor trade", then I can pick and choose which vendors best match me.

Obviously many vendors are trying to game me, and so would rather not reveal this information to me, but the ones that are trying for a cooperative relationship with me frankly already largely know me on a first-name basis. I'm not as worried about finding ways to find systems to manage my relationship with them.

So how do I build that sort of Vendor Relationship Management?

And then, deeper than that, since so many vendors provide their value primarily by merchandising products designed and made by other manufacturers, how do I give individual products identity so that I can actually differentiate and compare between the $5 and the $50 pliers from one vendor vs the $35 pliers from another?