Doc Searls and David Berlind on Intention

David Berlind interviews Doc Searls on the Intention Economy, a concept Doc introduced a few months ago to reflect his concern that discussions about the Attention Economy were devolving into "Top Tips for Modern Marketers" and losing their focus on the real needs of actual individuals. David quotes from his podcast with Doc:

Said Doc in response to my first question about what the Intention Economy is:

It's everything that follows the intention of somebody to buy something. It's everything after marketing's work is done. In other words, I intend to buy a Ford Focus four-door wagon and I want to let the market know that and see what comes to me. It's what begins with a finished intention on the part of the customer. And it's expressed that way in part to get attention out of the room because marketing is basically in the attention business. I want to pay attention to what your doing. I want to look at your attention stream. I want to find a way to capture your attention, skewer your eyeballs and be sticky and all that other stuff that marketing wants to do. The intention economy is the economy that begins with the fact that customers have money to buy something. How do you get that respected? What's the infrastructure we need for that, how do we build on that?

In fact, as evidenced by his use of the word "respected," Doc is practically offended by advertising and thinks that if more businesses could learn how to harness the intention of purchasing dollars (instead of the attention of them), that it's actually a much more respectful way to treat customers (in addition to being a more efficient use of marketing and advertising budgets).

I think Doc's absolutely right to keep the focus on individuals and their needs. While I'm encouraged to see the subject of attention gaining traction in the wider world, I don't want to see it hijacked by old-school marketers and transformed into the latest, greatest version of behavioral targeting. That would be a tragic waste. And I think he's right to caution marketers who are hoping to glean the secret of higher sales from attention metrics--they're not necessarily the path to revenue nirvana.

But speaking for myself, I don't frame this discussion as intention vs. attention. (I'm not suggesting that Doc does, either.) The two concepts aren't in opposition to each other. In some contexts, I suspect that our intentions will be readily communicated by taking a broad look at our attention data over time and the trends that emerge. In other contexts, our attention data will be cross-referenced with other types of data to achieve the same effect.

Quoting from Doc's original post on the subject of intention:

[W]e need to start viewing economies, and markets, from the inside out: from the single buyer toward the surrounding world of sellers. And to start constructing technical solutions to the buyer's problem of getting what he or she wants from markets, rather than the seller's problem of getting buyers' attention.

I couldn't improve on that if I tried, and it seems entirely consistent with AttentionTrust's principles. So rather than see a conflict between these two concepts, a goal of mine is to infuse Doc's perspective on intention into discussions about attention as much as I can.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+data attention+economy intention+economy doc+searls david+berlind