Earn your customers each day. You don’t own them

I had an interesting discussion today around the move to ‘bots’ in messaging apps. The concern was that the messaging provider — Facebook, Apple and others, would own the customer as soon as we embed functionality into the message platform and the business would lose control of our customers and the channel to them.

A seemingly valid concern, but it’s too late. We’ve already lost that battle. Our business is an app on a platform already owned by Apple or Google on the mobile device, and the channel to market is via Facebook, Twitter or other online providers who own these channels.

The better conversation is about how we earn our customers each day through amazing service and products, not how we own them.

This post originally appeared on Inside Innovation