Identity management: recognition instead of attention

20 Oct Identity management: recognition instead of attention

By Jorg Jelden
Trendbüro

«When we look inside ourselves, there’s nothing there. Identity is constructed – not found. Identity is created by feedback.» Norbert Bolz, 13th Trend Day

In the past, the possibilities for living one’s own life were limited. Identity was static and given. Family, work and religion defined a fixed frame. The economy was dictated by scarcity. Money became the central agent of control. Today consumers have a multitude of options for designing their lives. Self-responsibility is a must, individuality the ultimate goal. Otherness is normality. The economy is determined by oversupply and time poverty. He who attracts attention is the winner. In future, individual opportunities for design will continue to increase. Compulsory self-responsibility will force consumers to optimise their own self. This will call for deliberate decisions and new orientation frames. Identity will become a management assignment. Tomorrow’s economy will be shaped by the lack of identity and affiliation. Recognition will become the new key quantity.

Body: Health

Consumers will be old for longer than they are young – and the old will be in the majority. Birth rates will stay low in most European countries in the next ten to fifteen years. In Germany the share of over-60s will increase from 29% today to approx. 34%. The longing for youthfulness is becoming the central driver for self-design. There is a growing willingness to increase one’s own health and attractiveness by investing in the body. Together with 23andme.com, Google finances a website where consumers can have a genetic test carried out. This analysis is the basis for further self-optimisation. In future, consumers will be able to keep permanent track of their state of health. The data is transmitted straight to the doctor or health insurance company. Google and Microsoft are currently developing a programme for appropriately networked medical records.

Security: Data

Consumers are increasingly leaving digital traces. Personal and behaviour-related data is becoming transparent. The security of one’s own personal data is becoming a central need, controlling it a management assignment. Data protection the way we know it is a phase-out model. And it isn’t only younger consumers who are happy to divulge personal information. The more personal and relevant offerings become, the more generous consumers are with their data. But consumers have no control over or access to this data. There is no way for them to delete or correct information that might make a bad impression. The need to retain control over this data is producing new, user-centric business models. User-centric offerings like OpenID will revolutionise online authentication. Access rights will become an increasingly important issue. Biometric recognition technologies will continue to establish themselves.

Social Relationships: Networking

In a hyper-individual world, setting oneself apart from the crowd becomes less important. Instead, consumers are increasingly intent on finding common ground. As self-responsibility grows, the individual’s own social networks are becoming a form of social and economic safeguard. The focus is shifting to individual connectivity. After all, nobody wants to be alone. Affiliation is becoming freely selectable and calls for commitment. Our own contacts decide on our individual access possibilities. This requires us to establish and cultivate personal networks. The number of loose ties is increasing more rapidly than the number of close friends and acquaintances. The Web allows us to maintain contacts with people from different social circles with no time or space restrictions. These networks are becoming primary sources for information and reputation. Feeds inform every friend in a social network about all the user’s activities. In future, these lifestreaming activities will publish all activities from all communities and shops. Google has already recognised the value of this phenomenon and has launched various initiatives aimed at making use of these social graphs. In future, individuals will increasingly practise self-marketing the same way companies do today.

Recognition: Reputation

The high number of possibilities for designing individuality also increases the necessity of making the right choices. The recognition of elective peers is becoming the ultimate maxim. Future actions are optimised on the basis of feedback from friends. In contrast, material status symbols are losing their importance. The more active consumers are and the more actively they publish their actions, the more trust and respect they enjoy from like-minded people. If something earns recognition, it must be right. Active individuals can communicate their actions via their networks. Consumers are thus turning into fans and connoisseurs. But whether and for what somebody gains recognition greatly depends on the context. Something that earns recognition in the working world may have the opposite effect amongst friends. Since we are increasingly living in several contexts, we need to pay more attention to the consequences of our own actions.

Self-actualisation: Creativity

Self-actualisation no longer has anything to do with the fun and experience society of the 80s and 90s. Today, values and meaning are becoming increasingly important. However, it is essential to find meaning in one’s own everyday actions. That requires us to seek activities that stir our passion, present us with a challenge and serve a higher purpose. Anybody who self-actualises does so out of passion. He works for his own ethos and achieves something for himself, something that helps him grow and which he benefits from. That spurs him on and motivates him. Work is transformed from a necessary evil into a form of self-actualisation. In future, it will be a matter of developing the power inherent in this creativity.

Customer Relations are becoming more important than products

For companies, identity management means redefining their relationship with their consumers at an individual level and making it the focal point of how they do business. Consumers are becoming increasingly active, demanding and curious. Innovation lifecycles are getting shorter. Products are increasingly losing their power to differentiate. The credit crunch in the West as well as new powerful players from emerging markets will raise the question of efficiency again. But companies are still focusing on gaining new customers instead of cultivating those they already have. Whilst brands owe 80% of their sales to regular customers, they manage to lose 43% of them in just three years.

Companies: Service Chain Management

The shift of focus from product to customer relations calls for new value chains. These will be based on and around individual customers. Brands need to align all their partners and departments so as to build strong relations and understand customers at individual level. Just as they manage the supply chain, brands need to manage their service chains as well. Besides standardising their output, partners and departments need to share customer history and knowledge, making it a readily available tool that enables all those involved to offer customers the best possible service.

Branding: Reframing

The magic formula for brands is to constantly reinvent themselves without losing their character. But instead of hammering a new name to the headquarters and reinventing the brand with every new CMO, it is vital to look at customer perception. Toymaker Lego is an excellent example. Kids are increasingly playing with video games. In response to this development, Lego have redefined their core competence as «creative play». Today, besides their traditional plastic bricks, Lego also produces the very successful video games Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Lego Batman. These video games have become an important growth field for the toymaker. And when their parents say it’s time to switch the console off, the kids keep right on playing the same game – but with the traditional bricks instead.

PR: Listen

As customers become more and more connected, they are increasingly turning into fully-fledged opinion leaders. Public relations will need to learn to listen. With the help of new tools, PR can listen in on the chatter taking place in the world of social media. Trendbuero has just established InsightBench, a semantic opinion-mining tool for analysing digitally published opinions. And PR will need new tools to find super-connected customers who act as opinion leaders. Google recently filed a patent to adapt its successful page-ranking system to people. It will measure how well the individual is connected. How many indirect contacts he has. And how fast and far his message will spread.

Advertising: Interaction

With mobile Internet around the corner, there will be unlimited touchpoints betweens brands and customers in the near future. Each touchpoint is an essential part of the brand experience, from call centre to website to iPhone Widget. This calls for new types of advertising. Rather than attracting attention, it will be crucial for brands to get feedback – and to react to that feedback. Just as they need a corporate identity, brands also need a corporate interaction design. This also means that the function of advertising will change. Tomorrow, advertising will be synonymous with service. According to Nuance, 72 percent of customers who are planning a purchase research other customers’ service experiences online. 74 percent base their purchase decisions on these ratings.

Conclusion

People’s desire to upgrade themselves, new media structures and changing communication behaviour will alter the way brands do business in the near future. Brands will become democratised and have to learn to use the feedback from their customers as input for future business.

Jörg Jelden is a senior consultant at Trendbuero, Consultancy for Social Change. He advises clients like OTTO, eBay, SEB Bank, Arcandor or O2 on the business opportunities inherent in social change. Together with Prof. Peter Wippermann, he was responsible for the concept of the 13th German Trend Day and authored the «Identity Management Manifesto» (09/2008).