By Distribution Solutionz | January 31, 2012 at 10:44 AM EST | No Comments
Reprint of one of our most popular blogs of all time - Originally published in August 2010
Part 1 of a 2 Part Series on Individual Relationship Management (IRM) versus Customer Relationship Management (CRM) By Guest Author, John Fleming, Executive Advisor to Solutionz
For well over a decade, customer relationship management (CRM) practitioners have touted the marriage of customer information with demographic, psychographic and behavioral propensity data to help you get closer to your customer, member, guest or prospect.
While this has taken customer intimacy way beyond what was possible before the application of technology to the challenge of knowing your customers better, there are inherent flaws in this approach.
CRM, being technology driven, largely collects customer data from past transactions with the assumption that past behavior begets future behavior. And, by putting this information at the hands of the frontline while engaging a customer will help the sales or service teams be more informed, increase cross-selling and up-selling, increase close rates, reduce expenses and in general contribute to a firms operational excellence.
The benefits of CRM accrue to the organization. If it were a net sum analysis one can see that what is gained by the firm is at the expense of the customer. This is an exaggeration of course as customers are not led in and tied down as we pry their money from them but they are guided toward options with varying degrees of energy to buy additional options. Service contracts anyone? Or the softer online approach of: “Customers who bought this also bought:…” and the list plays out before you.
This is not a “relationship” this is a system to optimize the output from each customer contact. It does not consider the different preferences of customers at different points in time or with different products, or as we suggest, in different circumstances and with different intent and with different companions.
"Do I have a relationship with 17 million people?" asked Jim VonDerheide, vice president, CRM Strategies, for Hilton Hotels , I don't think I do," VonDerheide said, answering his own question. "Do I interact with 17 million people? You bet."
The focus of CRM is optimization of transactions and processes and has little to do with managing a relationship.
But, let’s look at the customer side of the transaction. They are always the other side of the sales/service engagement. It would not occur without them. Yet, few of us has the same need or personal mindset every time we are on the customer side of the transaction.
We could be alone or with several kids tugging at our coat tails; we could be with a spouse or a business associate or buying for one of them; we can find ourselves an endless number of personal preferences or personality modes.
To make the customer experience one that meets or exceeds the customer’s expectations we would ideally be able to adjust to these individualized circumstances and ‘relate’ to the customer in a manner that would leave them in a better mind set than when we started. And, feeling that they would want to come back and better recommend us to others. The challenge then is to be able to relate to each customer transactions as a positive engagement of two parties who collectively strive for relationship that can be repeated time and again. Not just an interaction.
The bottom-line challenge is that CRM is one-dimensional, as is the typical customer profile. People are inherently multi-dimensional -- behaving one way [aka having different preferences] when they are alone, another when they are with their spouse/partner, another when they are with friends and yet another when they are with family. Add to that the dimensions of intent and situation and it becomes immediately apparent as to why traditional CRM really cannot reliably predict behavior.
Stay tuned for tomorrow's blog which will present part 2 of the argument for IRM - Individual Relationship Management.
By Distribution Solutionz | January 31, 2012 at 10:42 AM EST | No Comments
Reprint of one of our top 10 blogs of all time - 2 part series from August of 2010, but timeless in content.
Part 2 of a 2 Part Series on Individual Relationship Management (IRM) versus Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
By Guest Author, John Fleming, Executive Advisor to Solutionz
Individual Relationship Management - IRM - is not a technology, but a cultural foundation that must exist in a company before customer intimacy can become a reality.
While there have been many attempts at one-on-one marketing in the past leveraging CRM technology, IRM transcends that and takes you to the next level of customer intimacy.
IRM requires that you understand the context and situation that your customer or prospect is in at the time that you are interacting with them (the who, what, when, where, how and why behind the interaction). This is the only way that you can be assured that what you are presenting is relevant and meaningful, reinforcing your relationship with the customer and building the engagement at the same time.
CRM will provide benefits operationally as the vast experience with the various CRM tools has demonstrated. And, in many instances the frontline and the customer will have a more meaningful interaction because a new level of attention overlays the transaction.
Yet it does not answer the IRM questions posed above. And, as such the delivery system (see model below) becomes more static and fails when it comes to being agile enough to adjust to changing relationship circumstances.
This may be fine if your business is based on operational excellence such as McDonalds, or Amazon. But, if for example your business is based on sustaining a growing member/customer base or attempting to achieve a preferred service provider status; then it is imperative that the individual relationship be a focus of the service engagement. And, note that we are now talking about an engagement rather than a transaction.
The IRM process must begin with a complete understanding of customer expectations and whether done by survey or focus groups, or whether your front line provides you their observations and insights, this step in achieving an IRM-based culture can't be skipped.
Inspired by the models and thoughts contained in Service Management by Richard Normann
The engagement of both a service provider and a customer in a relationship that will result in an exchange of value between both parties. Truly, a mindset that both parties have to win or have to feel better about the relationship after the engagement than before.
As stated earlier this outcome is the result of focused effort to build and sustain a cultural foundation that is based on serving customers or serving those that do at every level of an organization.
For more information about achieving Customer Intimacy through deployment of an Individual Relationship Management (IRM) strategy, please contact us at (813) 925-0789.
By Distribution Solutionz | January 31, 2012 at 10:26 AM EST | No Comments
Republishing the #2 blog of all time - Updated from blog originally published in December of 2008
Cartoon Credit: Mike Baldwin, Cornered, used by permission through CartoonStock™
I have been in the travel industry since 1978. I started in a travel agency in Milwaukee WI, working for Bay Travel in the suburb of Whitefish Bay.
We had a leisure agent who at the time was older than God himself and who had been everywhere and done everything. Her name was Agnes.
Every time I see this cartoon by Mike Baldwin, I think of Agnes.
Agnes was the quintessential travel agent. She knew how to start the dialogue from whatever worked for the client.
If they knew who they were traveling with, and didn't particularly care where they went, she would drill down into what they liked to do when they were together. Note, she didn't profile them separately when they were traveling as a couple, as modern CRM and profile systems do.
No, Agnes knew what they liked when they were traveling as a couple, as a family, in the summer, in the winter, when they were wanting to relax and when they were seeking adventure or just following their inbred sense of wanderlust. She knew that it wasn't always the same things. The type of hotel might change, restaurant recommendations, attractions, entertainment. Well you know. You don't always want the same thing either. But the industry and our technology has button-holed us into strict profiles. Business and Leisure if we are lucky. Beyond that, you have to wade through the options yourself and weed out what you don't want.
If they wanted to drive versus fly, Agnes didn't care. She knew that she would make up the lost commission (yeah, remember when selling an airline ticket guaranteed you a 10% commission?) on booking their hotel rooms for them. She didn't use the newfangled Apollo™ computers. She felt more comfortable talking to the various travel suppliers to ensure that what they were offering was a perfect match for her clients.
If they did know where they wanted to go, Agnes would help them have the best time possible there. She scoured the brochure rack (now I'm really dating myself) and would recommend things that she had done in those very places. While the term "social networking" had not yet become vogue, I suspect that Agnes was a master networker and had a card system where she could cross reference what other clients had been to the places that they were interested in.
She didn't assume when they walked in the door that they wanted the cheapest thing. She didn't assume they wanted to go to Orlando, Hawaii or Las Vegas. She would handle their trips to family reunions, soccer tournaments, concerts, weddings, funerals. Agnes just wanted to help and she wanted to make sure that her customers would come back to her.
And if you didn't know when you wanted to travel, Agnes was ok with that. If you knew that you wanted to travel in the spring, she'd suggest things that were good spring things. And if you said you wanted to go to a dude ranch in the winter, she wouldn't suggest Montana, but instead would find something for you in Arizona or New Mexico. And if all you knew was that you had 4 days for a trip, she'd be able to tell you what you could and couldn't reasonably accomplish in that time frame.
Best of all, when all was said and done Agnes would type (yes on an IBM Selectric™) a custom itinerary, including things that couldn't be booked, but that she knew they would want to know about. Even when she saw that Apollo™ could print an itinerary with the air, hotel and car segments, she knew that her clients needed more. I even saw her attach a map for the clients that wanted to drive. I didn't even know that AAA existed at that time, so from my own limited experience, Agnes produced the first custom "TripTik™".
Imagine if we could recreate Agnes........
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Postscript January 31, 2012
In 2006/7 I raised $7m and built out a technical solution to the "Agnes" challenge. It was built as a B2B platform that could have been used by travel agents, consumers and a wide range of other businesses that touch the road traveler.
While that entity was a casualty of the economic crisis, we still possess the technology and are still pursuing the patent. If you are interested in this market, check out http://www.project85thinktank.com and contact me directly.
As a follow on to my earlier article about doing the math on distribution costs, I can't resist commenting on Delta spending $100 million on its website, or roughly $1 per passenger boarded, based on 2010 performance.
The premise here is presumably that Delta would hope that by investing this amount of money, that it would drive business directly to its website instead of other channels (including agencies, TMCs and OTAs). And of course, it would hope to save at least $100 million in distribution costs to cover the investment. Mr. Anderson, please correct me if I'm wrong.
If indeed the average booking fee to a GDS were say $5.00, that would be 20 million segments that they would need to shift to cover the investment. Since the average ticket has 2.6 segments, that would be approximately 7.6 million tickets. With just over 110 million passengers boarded annually on Delta, that is under 7% of their total volume.
So it sounds logical that with a $100 million dollar investment, they could shift 7% from the GDS powered travel agency and travel management company channel. Right?
But if every ticket that is sold on the internet yields $26.49 less than the travel agency channel (which per ARC is the current delta between the ticket sold through the agency and the average online sale), then that is potentially a loss of $201 million on that channel shift decision. And since a big part of Delta's activity is international, the delta (pardon the pun) on those tickets is a minimum of $67.83 per international ticket more on tickets sold through brick and mortar agencies.
I would categorize that as an "unintended consequence" of the decision to draw more folks to Delta.com, but one that they company must seriously consider.
As an aside, according to Compete.com, in May 2011 Delta had 7,329,643 unique visitors to its website, up 15.63% month over month and down year over year 0.16%.
And I was just kidding about the $80 million, but seriously.... for $100 million you'd better end up with a really amazing website. And one would hope that it would have strong double digit conversion.
By Distribution Solutionz | January 30, 2012 at 11:48 AM EST | No Comments
I love online review sites. I really do. And I use them to help me do everything from finding the perfect high school for my daughter, to buying a fabulous new refrigerator and yes, to book travel.
According to a 2011 article by Kevin May of TNooz, 60% of all reviews are positive, 28% are "neutral" and just 12% are out and out negative. These stats were taken from a study done by Spain-based ReviewPro.
Most legitimate review sites (including TripAdvisor, iGouGO, TravelPost as examples) have a vehicle for hotels, restaurants and attractions. But you should be aware that other travel related services such as online travel booking services sit out in the hinterlands of these sites, often reported in moderated forum sections of the site.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I happen to manage one of the top 100 travel booking sites (per Hitwise/Experian), that thanks to our user generated destination and property reviews is also in the top 40 in the travel and accommodations category. The site is RoomStays.com. You will recognize the site from the examples in this video.
What I've been finding out is that if a consumer comments on our site (or any other online site), the designated moderators (who are generally NOT employees of the review site) are allowed to make very general and often inflammatory comments that are not always an "informed position".
Out of my frustration with these sites, I created this video to help consumers "vet" sites that they are considering using for both travel booking and for reviews.
This video is intended to give consumers a way to gauge the viability of online travel booking sites from empirical evidence provided by independent analytics firms (such as Compete.com) and trusted advisors, such as the Better Business Bureau.
What consumers should consider when selecting an online booking service:
1. PROFITABILITY - This is readily available for those sites that are run by public companies. We recommend checking out the companies on Yahoo Finance and paying special attention to the Key Statistics section and the MARKET CAP, REVENUES and GROSS PROFIT. 2. VOLUME METRICS - For private companies that do not disclose the profitability information, volume metrics are key. To check the volume metrics, we recommend that you use COMPETE.com, an independent analytics site. You can put in ANY URL, including the URL of review sites and booking sites. This site shows TRAFFIC, GROWTH and SEASONALITY.
TRAFFIC - It is important to note that to run an online business of any kind, you must have a sustainable amount of traffic. While that number changes based on your business model, I have a rule of thumb that I look at companies that have over 100,000 average unique visitors per month as "viable". Now that doesn't mean that they are profitable on a cash flow basis, but it does mean that they have a great chance of surviving and thriving.
GROWTH - What you want to look at here is year over year growth, as month over month (particularly during 4th quarter), travel sites will often show a decline due to SEASONALITY.
SEASONALITY - If you look at both large companies in a particular category (such as Online Travel Agencies OTA), you will see the "normal seasonality" over the course of a 12 month period. In travel, it is totally normal for visitors and bookings to decline after Labor Day. Do not be concerned if you look at the current Compete.com site for your favorite site and see a decline for December. Next month they will show January stats and you will see a remarkable rebound for nearly all travel sites.
There is also a great feature that lets you click on SIMILAR SITES.
3. REPUTATION - This one used to be simple. You could call the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and see how they rank the firm. With the advent of online ranking sites, this is no longer quite as clear cut as there are many companies getting into this "game".
Some sites (include the BBB) charge the business to become "accredited", but the BBB has very strict standards for accreditation and they will not grant the use of their logo to companies that don't adhere to their standards. If a site allows you to pay to claim your business, but does not have any quality standards, beware. What this means is that companies may not be able to challenge complaints that are posted without becoming a member.
Once again, you can use COMPETE.com to see how many people are actually using the review site and stick with those that are used by a broader range of consumers and also take a look at the ratio of negative comments to positive comments and see if it aligns with the ratios that were noted in the TNooz article. If they are unduly skewed toward the negative, beware, as you may only be getting the views of those people that may never be happy with anything. Most review sites allow you to click through to see the complaint history of an individual and you can easily see patterns emerging that could render their complaint as fraudulent.
4. KNOW THE POLICIES - Back before the advent of online travel, you could call a travel agent or a hotel and "reserve" a room without paying. Not so with most online travel sites. On most sites, you pay up front and the retailer is responsible for conveying the reservation details and payment to the hotel prior to check in. This is not always instantaneous, so you may call a hotel right after booking to see if they have your reservations and they may not have the details yet. This is generally a limitation of the level of sophistication of the property, not the booking site.
Every booking site and every property have their own unique relationship and contract for how changes and cancellations are handled. Please make sure you read the website's policies before booking so that there will be no surprises.
Even if there is a "no cancellation" policy for prepaid bookings, if there is a reason out of your control (e.g. an accident or illness), the booking site will generally work with you. They may require proof, so make sure that you keep documentation from your doctor or hospital that can be faxed to their customer service department.
5. GET EDUCATED, THEN BOOK AND GO! If you do your homework, you should be able to confidently book and go on your trip, knowing that your reservation will be secure. Many of the complaints that we see on the review sites have to do with the hotel's customer service or the hotel not honoring what was confirmed.
We recommend that you give the company a chance to respond to you directly if you do have a problem (versus posting on one of the hundreds of complaint sites that may or may not be monitored daily by the company). If the problem was with the hotel and the hotel refuses to resolve it, then by all means, post your negative review of the property on a public site. Quite often the booking site will remove that hotel from its live booking system if they repeatedly create this type of service problem.
If you are happy with the elements of the trip, please post a positive response on the various public sites and mention who you used to book the trip.
If you have additional ideas for vetting sites and companies, I'd love to hear about it.
By Distribution Solutionz | January 04, 2012 at 11:02 AM EST | No Comments
Get kids back to school. Check.
Join health club. Check.
Eat more fruits and vegetables. Check for fruits, check for vegetables.....
Only thing left is to predict what we are going to see in 2012 in travel distribution. Today's topic is Google.
Google Will Be A Player We know that Google controls search. No doubt about that. Google has 78.7% of desktop search market share and a whopping 91.3% of mobile search share. This translates into financial strength for the search giant, as he who controls search, controls the associated advertising dollars. Google's revenues are in excess of $36 billion per year.
Control of advertisers' wallet. Check
As the green line on the chart at the left shows, they are gaining significantly in the browser space. Desktop control is the beginning of behavioral influence. Ask the GDSs how it worked for them with the travel agency desktop.
Control of eyeballs. Check
To date, they have insisted that they are not going to be a player in the sale of travel.
It is tough to take any other stand when a number of their top advertisers are top travel retailers. Priceline, Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz are major customers of Google and collectively spend more than $350m annually on advertising.
If Google wants to get in the game, they need to balance the revenues that they could generate from the actual sale of travel, with the ad revenues that they may lose if they compete with their customers. Step one was to introduce some healthy coopetition with the industry. So they invested $700 million in ITA Software to add robust air search capabilities and they also built their hotel finder product. Both are ad driven, consistent with their original model, but now, coupled with their existing search dominance and their growing browser dominance, they now have significant influence over consumer choice.
Control of consumer choice for travel. Check.
So will there be more? What can Google do now? There is Google +, their new foray into dominating the social grid. And of course there is the Android on the mobile front. Not to mention Google Maps and Google Local. Oh and did we mention the acquisition of Zagat for restaurant reviews?
The question isn't can they knit it all together into a cohesive travel strategy. It is when will they?
All it takes is market capitalization and available cash and a strong passel of lawyers well versed in antitrust.
Google currently has a market cap of $214 billion and has $35.76 billion in cash on the balance sheet.
By Distribution Solutionz | November 28, 2011 at 10:08 AM EST | No Comments
First, I have to admit that I am an HGTV addict. My favorite shows are those that work with a small budget to make a big impact, transforming a room in just a few short days.
I just finished redecorating my 13-year old daughter’s room.
The Mission Update her room from the blue and white little girl’s room to a more sophisticated look, suitable for a young teen.
The Plan Get the whole thing done while she was in Seattle visiting relatives for the holidays, so that it would be a total surprise.
The Goal A big WOW at the “big reveal”. I wanted to blow her away. And I did.
My redecorating “toolkit” was pretty simple.
Paint for the walls, along with a drop cloth, brushes, rollers and paint pans.
LOTS of spray paint to update her dressers from a juvenile white to a hammered deep brown metallic finish and one of those white things to cover your nose
Contrasting metallic spray paint to paint the dresser knobs and various and sundry accessories, such as shelves and side tables
Rit dye to change her curtains from white to deep brown
Repurpose wall décor from other parts of the house
New bedding and a few coordinated lamps
My point here is that even for the most mundane of tasks, there is a mission, a plan and a goal. And you also need a toolkit, some elements that you may already have and be familiar with and others where you may need to invest.
Now let's shift gears and let's look at the ideal distribution plan and see how it measures up to your plan.
The Mission Sell as much of your products and services as possible, through as many channels as are practical to manage. The Plan Sell through the highest yield channels to reach the greatest number of customers possible.
The Goal The highest per unit profit possible.
Your toolkit should include:
Knowing your average unit cost to produce (or procure) your product or service.
Setting a price that covers your unit cost and provides enough of a margin to cover operating costs and also to provide an acceptable operating profit
Knowing the unit cost per channel to distribute your product AND the average unit revenues per channel. The net of these is your channel profitability.
Make sure that you know how your customers are looking for your product, including search, metasearch, user-generated feedback sites, blogs, mobile, etc.
Focusing your marketing and support programs to get people to buy through your highest yield channels. (NOTE TO SELF: This may not be your own website.)
There is really no mystery here. Distribution is about marrying buyers and sellers.
Profitable distribution is about selling your product for more than it costs you to make and distribute it.
If you make more profit selling through a third party (even if it costs you slightly more on a per unit basis), then don’t discount your product to get people to come directly to you. It is that simple.
At the end of the day (or the quarter), the big reveal should yield a big WOW from your leadership and your shareholders if you stick to this plan.
By Distribution Solutionz | November 12, 2011 at 05:21 PM EST | No Comments
In light of the current airline/GDS debate and how much the following article reminded me of Jim Davidson of Farelogix and what he is facing on the airline distribution front, I had to reprint this article from John F. Davis III, the original CEO of THISCO (now known as Pegasus Solutions).
Oh, and since Rupert Murdoch is in the news this week, I also found it interesting that Murdoch's Newscorp was actually the original investor behind THISCO (before it sold the travel assets to Reed Elsevier).
Well, I have to say that John Davis and Jim Davidson don't really look all that much alike, but there are many similarities.
Now John Davis isn't known for creating a caricature of himself and producing videos about cookies, but he is every bit as plucky an entrepreneur as Mr. Davidson.
Davis was a pioneer in hospitality. Davidson in airline distribution.
Both men challenge the status quo and belong in the travel distribution hall of fame. Both built platforms to directly connect suppliers to the distribution community (including in THISCO's case, the GDS themselves).
Davis' story is being told in retrospect. Davidson is right in the throes of his, with August 1st looming just around the corner - some call this D-Day for AA and Sabre.
Pay special attention to what Davis was told by distribution pioneer Max Hopper when Davis told him that he intended to connect his hotel switch to Sabre. The rest, as they say, is history.
The Formation of THISCO - By John F. Davis III(originally published in 2002 onHospitality Net)
It was December 1988, and the most amazing event in the history of the hotel industry had occurred. Sixteen of the largest hotel chains in the world had agreed to contribute $100,000, each in order to fund a start-up company. It would be nice to say that the hoteliers came up with the idea to create and fully fund the new company and technology. The truth is that the majority of the funding and the initial concept was created by a division of Rupert Murdochs' company, News Corp., specifically by a gentleman named John Evans.
It would also be nice to say that News Corp. made the investment for the sole, honorable purpose of helping to further the development of technology for the hotel industry. Again, the truth of the matter was that Murdoch's company (which was acquired shortly thereafter by Reed Travel Group) needed an electronic way to book hotel rooms in order to support the creation of a new CD hotel catalog. Their desire to create the ability to electronically link the GDS's with the hotels' CRS in order to sell CD-ROM's came at exactly the same time as the hotels' desire for a single electronic interface to all seven GDS's. Never before, nor do I believe it will ever happen again, did the desires of a huge corporation align perfectly with the hotel industry. Timing and technology came together at precisely the same time. The stars were aligned. The Hotel Industry Switch Company (THISCO) was born.
There are literally hundreds of great stories in the creation of THISCO, which ultimately became Pegasus Solutions. One of my favorites revolves around the final funding vote by the 16 hoteliers. Each hotel company had to come up with $100,000. At that time, the idea of putting $100,000 of a hotel chain's money into a technology start-up was unheard of. As the debate moved back and forth, John Biggs of Hyatt stood up, looked his peers in the eye and made the following statement, "During this last week alone, we all have probably wasted more money than that ($100,000) on far worse ideas." That's actually not the exact quote; the real quote was a little spicier. But the point was made, followed by complete laughter and a unanimous vote.
During my interview process for the job of president of THISCO, I had been repeatedly assured that all 16 hotel companies and Reed fully supported the concept and that it would be "all for one, and one for all." As you can probably guess, nothing was further from the truth in the early days. I spent the first four months on the job performing "shuttle diplomacy." I flew from the headquarters of one participating hotel company to another, outlining what I thought was the best course for the industry. At each stop, I got a completely different opinion.
There are other great stories, some of which have become such famous folklore, that I would be negligent if I didn't repeat them in this article. One deals with Sabre and Max Hopper. My first meeting with Max, shortly after launching THISCO, produced two classic quotes. After fully explaining to Max how Sabre would connect to the THISCO Switch, and then how the THISCO Switch would connect to the hotel chains' CRS's, Max's response was, "Sabre would connect to THISCO over his dead body." THISCO connected to its first GDS — Sabre — in December 1989, and fortunately, Max is still alive and well. His second great quote came at the end of our meeting as I described the client-server technology we would employ to build the Switch. Coming from a company completely built on huge IBM mainframes and TPF transaction processing, his sarcastic response was, "Oh, so you're building a toy?" Today, that "toy" processes more than 300 million transactions per month.
There are lots of amazing stories, like when I found out that the hotelier in charge of the money contributed by the 16 hotels and Reed had decided the funds were better suited in his bank account than in THISCO's bank account. Essentially, THISCO was broke two months after I accepted the job as its president. The event caused a lot of sleepless nights, but in the end, the man's employer made good on all the funds and THISCO moved forward. I can absolutely assure everyone, it was never dull in the early days. Come to think of it, the past 14 years have been anything but dull.
I take great pride (and have earned a lot of air miles) in saying THISCO never had any vote that was not unanimous. A lot of diplomacy and the hard work and commitment to the hotel industry of 17 forward-thinking pioneers made THISCO. It will always give me a sense of amazement that every month Reed and 16 arch competitors got together in a room, and all agreed on what was best for the industry and best for their baby, THISCO. I'm sorry there is not a Hall of Fame for these 17 founders. What they achieved could only occur once in a lifetime.
By Distribution Solutionz | November 10, 2011 at 04:18 PM EST | No Comments
Recently someone on one of my investment community blogs asked the question: What will be the biggest surprise development in technology in 2020.
My response:
I firmly believe that we will move past customer relationship management (CRM) to individual relationship management (IRM) that is multi-dimensional, geo-aware and situational. Today, while digital marketing is very powerful, it is totally limited by the one dimensional view of the customer.
Google knows what I searched for last week, but not why and under what circumstances.
Expedia knows where I went last week, but does not know who I am with and what we like when we are together.
Yelp knows that I searched for Indian food, but doesn't know that when I'm with my kids, I want sushi instead, or perhaps want to add Thai to the list.
Ticketmaster knows I bought tickets to the Orlando Magic game, but not that the tickets were for my son and when I'm with my daughter we like to go to the theater instead.
Verizon FIOS knows what we as a household have marked as favorites on Video on Demand, but they don't have any idea what my husband and I like to watch when we are together, or that there are certain channels that I'd rather my kids not even be able to see on the channel listing when they are the ones watching TV.
And my GPS should truly be MY GPS and not give me the same responses it gives you when our preferences, situation and reasoning is different.
This transition takes agreement on the core elements of the multi-dimensional profile and the ability for me to store it in the cloud as a ubiquitous tool for the myriad of people that serve me content. This will of course require my permission for access, but it would alleviate having to have multiple versions/slices of the same data in multiple places.
A firm that I invested in a few years ago has a patent pending on this application and believe that while we were ahead of our time when we built it, that by 2020, this will be the norm.
We will no longer see (or even think about accepting) 55,500,000 responses on a Google search for restaurants in Tampa. It matters not to me that they found this level of irrelevant information in .29 seconds.
2020 will be the age of true relevance and hence the age of individually targeted advertising and marketing.
For more on IRM, see our original series from 2010.
And no, it is not best practice Dilbert style, but to get your attention we thought that we would embed a little humor and variety in our blog as it moves into its new home.
I know that many of you "have the t-shirt" with your own company's brand of change in direction that is portrayed in the Dilbert cartoon.
The one thing that resonates about Dilbert is that we have all known leaders that try to drive strategy and plans in areas where they do not have expertise. They definitely do not know best practice, even when it bites them.
Yesterday I came across an article published by Hubspot on best practice for company blogs. It said, unequivocally, that your blog should be a part of your website, not published separately on Blogger or Wordpress or some similar tool.
If you are the key person for both marketing and distribution and blogging falls on your long list of responsibilities, then perhaps you should read "13 Business Blogging Mistakes and Their Easy Fixes" from @HubSpot. Get it here: http://bit.ly/gTzEe3
We read it. We listened. So here we are. The Distribution Solutionz blog will now be an integrated part of this site.
I will begin by posting my most popular articles from my original blog site. For archived blogs, you will still be able to access the old blog HERE.
Thanks for following our musings on distribution. We address traditional distribution, as well as all manner of digital distribution.
By Guest Author, John Fleming, Executive Advisor to Solutionz
By Guest Author, John Fleming, Executive Advisor to Solutionz 
s the green line on the chart at the left shows, they are gaining significantly in the browser space. Desktop control is the beginning of behavioral influence. Ask the GDSs how it worked for them with the travel agency desktop. 
