Anyway, we started (by coincidence) in the group buy initiative around “heating oil”, Colin, you can not imagine the push back we got from the industry … “.. but iChoosr, we own the customer, not you !!!” And so they started several lawsuits against us. So far, we won them all (obviously). This was end 2008. What happened just now? One of the larger producers of heating oil approached us with the question “When will you guys organize a new groupbuy … ?”

Next in parallel, we started to organize a group buy initiative for energy contracts (also for consumers). Same reaction from the vendors “… but we own the customers … and iChoosr, who are you?”
But then, when I show 2.000 intentions from people, you notice that the sales guys at those companies start to listen. Only the marketeers but their heels in the ground.
The only players who are interested to join the auction are the smaller players, as they see this approach as a cheap lead generation effort. But do they understand/do they want to understand VRM ?? Absolutely not !!! It’s all short term thinking, based upon their “own” wallet …

That is THE problem with the VRM approach. Online, I guess you can convince the blogosphere and early adaptors @ Twitter, but then you only covered 0.01% of the people.
(in our heating oil example, we had 40% of the people subscribe to our initiative via a paper form …)

So I see iChoosr as a front runner in the evangelization of an early VRM application, but we need a long time to get it between the ears of Vendors and Consumers.

If you would like to have more feedback on our experience, do not hesitate to contact me.

Cheers and enjoy the weekend.

Bart Stevens
http://www.twitter.com/ichoosr
Bart