When the forest moves, you're toast.ByNick Usborne
"When the forest moves, you're toast" is a horrible translation of the following lines from Shakespeare's Macbeth, Act V, Scene 3:
"Till Birnam wood removed to Dunsinane, I cannot taint with fear."
If you don't recall the story from your school days, Macbeth had been told he'd be safe and sound until Birnam wood got up and moved to Dunsinane. Fat chance of that, he thought. But, of course, it did. His enemies cut branches from the trees in the wood and used them as camouflage to disguise their advance on Dunsinane. Bad day for Macbeth.
The parellel in the world of online commerce is that while everyone is obsessing over serving customers one to one, we're taking our eyes of the bigger "customer" picture. And in the bigger picture, the forest is beginning to move.
In the one to one world of online marketing we rally to that familiar cry "Know thy customer". And we rally with some big bucks, applying ever-more sophisticated technology to drill down to that final goal of knowing and serving each customer individually.
Treating each customer as a individual is a great objective. It has been the dream of direct marketers for years. Trouble is, we're all running after the one to one experience at a time when we should also be saying "Know thy customers". Note the pural there. Many customers, not one customer.
Amazon.com does a fantastic job of personalizing the customer experience at their site. Using collaborative filtering, they do as good a job,if not better, than any other large e-business. But in spite of this, they are not making anything in the way of profits. They're bending over backwards to show their customers a good time, but the cost of doing so is outweighing the return. So, maybe, to shamelessly tangle my metaphors, they're barking up the wrong tree.
If the basic model of that large e-tailers follow right now is suspect, where can they for guidance? Well, how about being customer-centric in a whole different way? Instead of looking at individual behaviors, how about looking at the behavior of all online customers, as one massive group? What customers en masse like to do when they're online?
That's easy. They like to connect with one another.
People online like to connect by email. According to eMarketer, 97 million active e-mail users will send 536 billion e-mails in 2000. By 2003, 140 million users will send 1.035 trillion emails.
They also like to chat with one another. Over 77 million people get together and share their thoughts and dreams throgh ICQ, with another 64 million using AOL's other messaging service, Instant Messenger.
And millions like to get together in chat rooms, newsgroups and other online venues. Do you want to chat with other people who are interested in English literature? No problem. Whatever your interest, you'll be able to find others who share it.
The bottom line? What your customers really like to do is hang out and communicate with one another. They connect as individuals, one to one, and connect in hundreds of thousands of small special-interest groups.
That is why eBay is such a huge success. It enables people to get together and do their thing, buying, selling, and sharing their own passions and opinions.
That's why Napster, Spinfrenzy, Gnutella, FreeNet and numerious offspring have grown to serve the shared interests of tens of millions of people online. Putting aside issues of copyright and intellectual property, these services tap in exactly to what people like to do over the Web. Connect and share.
If that's the heart of it, if connecting and sharing with other individuals and small groups online is the real core of life online, how does one to one marketing address that? Right now not very well.
While one to one marketing undoubtedly adds value to the customer experience at online stores, it may also be that customers are looking for alternatives to entering these virtual stores in the first place.
Maybe they see huge stores like Amazon as unnatural obstacles in the way of doing what they really want to do; to share and connect withy others. Maybe it's time to look at radical alternatives that fit much better within the natural ecology of this forest. Maybe this means building many more smaller stores that share and connect far better with small groups of individuals.
In a new world filled with maybes,one thing is sure. "Know thy customer" can no longer mean just slicing and dicing a demographic grouping or a customer database and trying to push people into your idea of their ideal experience.
It's time to look at rebuilding our e-business models in order to fit the realities of what millions of people actually like to do, day in and day out.
After all, with 140 million internet users in the US alone, we're talking about a very big forest. And it is coming this way fast.
Reprinted with permission from: Nick Usborne
Copyright © 2000 Nick Usborne. All Rights Reserved
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