I had the pleasure of presenting a wide-ranging workshop -- designed to break through old biz-model blinders -- to a very engaged audience at NYCML18 (the annual summit of NYC Media Lab) on Friday, 9/21/18.
We are now at a critical juncture in business, marketing, and broader aspects of market capitalism. If we do not rethink some dangerous unspoken presumptions, we will fail to reap the true promise of this emerging digital era.
The workshop was an exploratory “think tank” discussion on future directions in Customer Relationships, Value Propositions, and Pricing, which had been billed as follows.
- Participants will learn to see through presumptions now obsoleted by the new economics of digital content and services -- and make that concrete with the example of one promising architecture for a new logic.
- From there we will explore in open discussion how to chart a strategic path that (1) rethinks conventional approaches and (2) points to incremental steps toward a deepening transformation.
- This workshop relates to AI/ML and ethics in business models, and the “relationship economy” in which recurring revenue, subscription, and membership models are becoming mainstream, all driven by the “post-scarcity” economics of digital.
Our focus was on rethinking how we do business, earn profits, and create value in our new digital world. We considered a wide range of current and emerging models in terms of a "Ladder of Value" -- including subscriptions (unlimited, and usage-based), paywalls, freemium, membership, crowdfunding, patronship, pay what you want, micropayments, dynamic pricing, blockchain, and paying consumers for their data and attention. It drew on a perspective based on the FairPay architecture for win-win, customer-value-first relationships (described in depth in this blog) that spans a wide range of commercial services, journalism, the arts, and non-profits.
Similar perspective is conveyed in my post, The Relationship Economy -- It's All About Valuing Customer Experiences -- plus the "Ladder of Value" section at the end of Finding Value in The Subscription Economy
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More about FairPay
For a full introduction to FairPay see the Overview and the sidebar on How FairPay Works (just to the right, if reading this at FairPayZone.com). There is also a guide to More Details (including links to a video).
My article in the Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management, "A Novel Architecture to Monetize Digital Offerings" also provides an overview of FairPay (summarized more briefly in the ESADE Knowledge article "Three building blocks to monetize a digital business," and previously in Harvard Business Review, "When Selling Digital Content, Let the Customer Set the Price.").Even better, read my highly praised book: FairPay: Adaptively Win-Win Customer Relationships.
