Concept
Doc Searls coined the term in an article for Linux Journal. He wrote:
"The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You don't need advertising to make them."
Despite the advancement internet businesses are still seller oriented. Even successful businesses like Google still have the point of view of the sellers, with their revenue coming nearly all from advertising. Searls describes the current condition as a series of silos. The only option a buyer has is merely moving from silo to silo. Nothing has fundamentally changed.
Some sites have similar characteristics of an intention economy. For example flight booking services Priceline.com, which let users name their price for an airline ticket still functions like a "silo." In an intention economy a site like Priceline might serve as an intermediary with the airline coordinating new flight dates and times that correspond around the buyers intentions.
Companies need to be able to respond to a customers precise needs. "Mass customization, in a lot of areas it is no longer inherently necessary that I get the exact same thing as a million other people. A computer manufacturer can be geared for assembling a computer just for me, to my specifications. A travel agency can construct a travel plan particularly for me."
Read more about this topic: Intention Economy
Famous quotes containing the word concept:
“The concept of a person is logically prior to that of an individual consciousness. The concept of a person is not to be analysed as that of an animated body or an embodied anima.”
—Sir Peter Frederick Strawson (b. 1919)
“Jesus abolished the very concept of “guilt”Mhe denied any cleavage between God and man. He lived this unity of God and man as his “glad tidings” ... and not as a prerogative!”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the Establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality, but to those of another.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)