How to Protect Your Intellectual Property and Give Your Readers What They Want

by Paul Eisenberg

Nov 2006

Protecting intellectual property and copyrights are a constant concern in publishing—particularly when transforming from business models where print subscriptions once dominated to new models where the sale of online products and services are the keys to future success. Publishers need tools that help protect and help sell digital assets. They also need customer relationship management (CRM) tools that decrease costs while improving customer service. With this in mind, we explore a list of potential solutions, key functional requirements, and top level considerations for those looking to select or implement a solution.

Why adopt new access control solutions?

Currently, most organizations rely on a collection of internally built legacy systems that were conceived with a focus on the sale of print product subscriptions to individuals. In many cases, publishers have simply retrofitted old systems to accommodate new business models, but the process is typically never as easy, short, or efficient as it should be. As companies merge and grow many solutions bump up against capacity issues and a general lack of functionality and flexibility that would enable owners to keep pace or leap ahead of the competition. Worse yet, some managers complain that current systems cannot deliver data required to effectively service customer accounts and manage businesses. Over time, these problems are becoming increasingly significant especially as print incomes continue to shrink while online markets grow, and competition becomes increasingly fierce.

Changing focus from print to online products and services
Long internal development or integration lead times and costs
The need to manage ever expanding product portfolios
Scalability and performance problems
Limited promotional, licensing, and billing options that hinder business model flexibility
Visibility problems resulting due to missing or inconsistent data
Negative impacts on customer service and customer retention rates

Solution components

Book Business magazine recently published a list of considerations that should be taken into account when selecting an access control solution or planning an implementation ("E-commerce-Solution Shopping Made Easy"). In reviewing the list, it was very interesting to see the degree of diversity in approaches various solutions offer. In our view however, there are three primary components that are most critical to building a complete online subscription management solution:

access control
e-commerce
customer relationship management

Access control

Obviously, anyone who wants to charge money for content needs a means of protecting assets from unauthorized access. Solutions typically include a number of licensing options, the most basic of which is a set of simple user ID and password credentials that can be applied to individual named accounts. More sophisticated approaches include domain-based IP and URL authentication that can be used to support sales to institutions.

Validating that a user is who they claim to be is just one part of the overall equation. The next step in the process is to determine which specific assets a user is entitled to view or download. Here again most publishers will want a solution that presents the maximum number of options. Time-based licenses such as monthly or annual subscriptions represent variations on one type of model. Other options include pay-per-view and concurrent access licenses. In a pay-per-view model, publishers can exercise control over the number of times a particular asset is viewed whereas in a concurrent model they set limits on the number of users that can simultaneously access a given set of assets.

E-commerce

Now let's consider what it takes to sell access online. This is the point at which e-commerce functionality enters the picture. Product capabilities in this category enable publishers to define and promote or market products, and manage the collection of payments.

When it comes to defining and promoting products, many publishers seek to entice new customers to make purchase decisions by offering free trials, product combination bundles, pricing discounts, gift subscriptions, and hard-good premiums such as coffee mugs and t-shirts. More sophisticated solutions allow publishers to chain multiple offers together such that they are presented to users in a logical progression that is contingent on various parameters such as the passage of time and information collected regarding previous customer responses.

Regardless of what products and offers are defined, the ultimate goal is to collect payment. Smart publishers seek to have the widest possible array of options at their disposal. For example, publishers will often need to collect one-time payments for some products and recurring payments for time-based subscriptions that apply to other products. In addition, publishers need to define business rules governing invoice distribution, payment due date scheduling, and revenue recognition. For example, earned value accounting practices capable of quantifying deferred subscription liability is becoming an increasingly popular option with many CFOs. Systems must also be able to accommodate customized business rules related to handling of late payments as well as automatic suspension or reactivation of customer accounts.

Customer service

No company can afford to overlook customer service. Subscription management solutions can provide a vehicle for improving customer experience and driving bottom line growth. Getting this vital function right can mean the difference between increased customer retention and declining renewal rates. Functions typically include self-service account profile management, as well as user ID and password retrieval. Providing customers with these capabilities is a true win-win proposition because as the need for telephone-based interactions decreases, publishers see a corresponding reduction in associated overhead. Of course it is impossible and probably undesirable to eliminate all calls to customer service. After all, every interaction represents a valuable sales opportunity. When customers do call, representatives handling the interaction need the ability to search and modify customer account records. Depending on circumstances, representatives may also require the ability to grant temporary access or issue pro-rated refunds.

Implementation planning considerations

Now let's look at items you will need to consider when defining requirements. As is the case every time you are evaluating any type of IT solution, you need to take a critical look at business issues, such as price, along with the strength of each vendor's service and support offerings (or partner network). Obviously you will also need to look at technical architecture and think about integration with other systems (more on this subject later). Additionally, you will need to make a decision about how far out into the future you want to look when modeling your requirements.

None of these issues are unique to this domain. We usually recommend that customers limit consideration of future requirements to about a 6-month timeframe. With the pace of change in business today, predictions extending much past 6 months are very likely to be obsolete before they can be implemented or used. The question is, why complicate development (increasing costs, duration, and risk) with requirements that may never really be needed? A better approach is to limit your initial focus on the most basic and critical needs and plan to cover future needs by phasing in enhancements over time when you can be more certain about their value.

Customer modeling

Developers implementing this type of solution need to understand who are the buyers and users of your products. For example, do you sell to individuals and institutions? What details do you want to know about your users? Of course the usual profile items including name, address, e-mail, telephone fields are common, but don't forget to include market specific, demographic, and behavioral attributes that you want to monitor. These items can usually be defined using metadata and populated manually or as a result of transaction-based event monitoring and automated web tracking technology.

Product modeling

Developers also need to understand the structure of products you are selling. The primary challenge here is to think about your business and your content in new ways. First you need to take an inventory of all the products you currently sell. Next you need to decompose all of those products into their individual component parts and define the smallest saleable items. Getting this right requires imagination, creativity, and a good bit of content analysis. For example many publishers' online offerings are currently limited to companion web sites. Others however are also interested in selling associated information tools (or software applications) and individual content assets, or data sets. Needless to say, the end result of this type of analysis can lead to a vastly expanded portfolio of offerings and business model options. Good thing you will soon have a system to help manage all of this complexity - you are going to need it!

Offer components and management

Selling a product involves much more than just creating or defining it. Products must also be marketed and packaged for sale. In terms of access control and e-commerce, this step translates into the creation of offers and offer chains that can be used to target potential buyers via online postings, pop-ups, or mass marketing campaigns.

In the first part of this requirements exercise, you want to think about the workflow that you use to define offers. The workflow is important because it helps define business rules governing who can define offers, what information and approvals are needed, as well as terms and release conditions, etc. Next you will need to define a list of all the component parts of an offer including things like discount levels, expiration dates, redemption codes, etc. The result will essentially create a data model that will need to be populated each time a new offer is created.

The next part of the exercise relates to how offers might be bundled.or linked together in complementary ways. For example, you may want to be able to chain offers such that if a user declines or fails to act on one offer an alternate offer will be presented. Similarly, publishers typically like to define cross-sell and up-sell offers that present customers with the option to purchase additional products for a reduced price or extended subscription term. The options are nearly limitless.

Business rules and policies

Analysis of relevant business rules and policies governing presentation of offers will also be important. Examples of specific areas to examine include licensing terms and conditions, cross-sell and up-sell offer criteria and requirements, limitations on web-based sales that depend on unit quantities, dollar value, or geography, cancellation request processing, granting of refunds, and exchange credits, as well as revenue recognition, and late payment processing just to name a few. Success in this area depends on involving managers from a diverse set of functional areas who have sufficient knowledge to describe current policy and proper authority to make decisions in these areas.

IT landscape

Systems of the type described in this article often require integration with a variety of other internal and external systems. Integration candidates include:

Existing access control, e-commerce, and CRM platforms
Ad servers
Marketing campaign management systems
Content management systems
Customer directory databases
Credit card gateways
ERP finance/accounting systems
Print fulfillment systems
Sales optimization systems
Reporting/analytics/data warehouse systems

Documenting requirements in this area calls for collection of the following details regarding each system that you want to integrate:

Name
Brief description (e.g., type and/or purpose
Number of instances and/or quantity of systems by type
Data flow direction (e.g., bidirectional or one way)
Communications schedule or frequency (e.g., real-time, nightly, weekly, monthly, etc.)
Key differences vs. similar systems
Known issues (e.g., some systems experience high seasonal loads)
Platform (e.g. operating system, database, including release or version)
Description of any current plans to replace or upgrade

Once you have this information, technical resources will be in a good position to scope the design and development work ahead.

Bringing it all together

Organizations that are successful in implementing such solutions have the potential to realize great benefits. Chief among those benefits are greater flexibility in terms of developing new products, business models, and more diversified revenue streams. Companies also stand to increase speed to market for these items in combination with better targeting of market and customer segments. On the IT front, updating and consolidating older platforms not only improves data quality but can also increase operational efficiency. In the end, you can reduce your costs, improve customer experience, and drive up adoptions and customer retention.