What does ‘improving the economics of individuals’ mean?
It means:
- Enriching the outcomes they experience in their lives
- Improving the efficiency and productivity of their processes – things they do to achieve these outcomes
- Making the best use of their personal assets and resources, such as their time, money, knowledge and information, attention, energy, emotions, and so on.
As individuals, we are always trying to do these things all the time. Person-centric business models earn their keep by helping us to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of these tasks by adapting and applying the knowledge, skills, resources and infrastructure of the business world to them.
For example, many person-centric services will help individuals run personal ‘departments’ better: my home, my finances, my health, my personal transport, my communications, my information, my leisure, my social network, and so on.
Others will help individuals manage important life events better: marriage, divorce, moving home and such like.
Other, buyer-centric, services will help individuals improve the efficiency and effectiveness of personal processes such as ‘shopping’. The job of marketing is to help firms in their search for customers; the job of the buyer-centric added value buying service is to help individuals in their search for value.
Thus, instead of looking at a world of potential customers through the eyes of the firm, person- and buyer-centric services look at a world of potential providers through the eyes of the individual. Instead of focusing on the purposes, processes and outputs of the firm, person-centric commerce focuses on the purposes, processes and outputs of the person.
Buyer- and person-centric services effectively represent a huge new, ‘white space’ market – and when I say ‘huge’ I mean it. Buyer-centricity will affect all products, services and industries serving the life departments and events just mentioned – my home, my money, my health etc – plus all personal capital goods purchases (cars, homes, home equipment, computers etc), and most if not all routine replenishment and special purpose purchases too.
So why aren’t existing product and service providers falling over themselves to open this new market up? I’ll return to this in another posting soon.
Alan Mitchell
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