The future is coming and quickly.
But this isn’t news. Look all around you, and you’ll see how swiftly tech innovation is changing, evolving. Take, for example, self-driving cars, smart ovens, facial recognition on our personal devices. Right now, you can open your kitchen cabinet and notice you’re nearly out of dishwasher detergent and say, “Alexa, order more Cascade,” and it’ll arrive on your doorstep tomorrow. Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and other emerging tech are all changing our actual reality as we know it every single day.
We could argue that consumers are changing their behavior – like shouting to an empty room that they need something – because technology is changing first. Cool, new stuff becomes available, and early adopters (like us at Secret Sushi) jump on board, then the rest of the world starts to follow suit.
Robert Scoble, a well-known industry futurist and founder of Infinite Retina, a spatial computing consultancy that helps businesses adapt to emerging tech, says that what’s coming next takes this evolution to a whole new level.
“We’re moving towards hyper-personalized experiences.” – Robert Scoble, Founder – Infinite Retina
What Robert’s seeing in the industry is a movement towards an even deeper understanding of how consumers behave, and the business world around us adapting directly to the individual consumers accordingly.
I’m sure you’ve felt that sense of deja vu you get when you see the exact thing you were looking at on Amazon yesterday show up in an ad on your Facebook feed. Sure, this is happening to a lot of people, but each advertising experience is uniquely based on what you’ve shown interest in and where you spend time online after. It’s a little wild to some and it can be a lot creepy to others. This kind of ad technology has been in play for a long time. It only scratches the surface of what consumer technology and the information it provides businesses to create more personalized customer experiences. From a marketing perspective, “know your customer” has always been a mantra. Yet, most businesses are way behind their customer expectations and treat all as a monolith. What could be gained if your marketing could be even slightly more personalized?
Robert Scoble interviews Artie’s founders about the Autonomous Avatar space, and how they are building their business to bring virtual beings to life.
Want to really know your customers? Pay attention to the signals.
Digital experiences and connected technology give businesses opportunities to market differently in a much more personalized, bespoke way. But it also helps mitigate risk for them. When you learn about their customers through the way they interact with their technology, marketing is more efficient. Client acquisition costs can go down because customer experiences are more aligned with their current behaviors and needs. And if things change, guess what? You will know it because you’re paying attention to the signals. You’re no longer marketing to the middle and crossing fingers people will buy. Now you can market directly to consumers based on what you know about who they are and how they operate.
While this might appear a little scary in some ways, it’s also what we seem to want—deeper, more personal, and frictionless experiences in the service we receive. We want faster transactions; we want the brands we trust to know our name and to anticipate our needs before we have them. At a bare minimum, we want interactions with companies to be worth the time it sucks from our day when you market to us.
To hear more from Robert Scoble, listen to our interview with him: The Future is Coming: How Emerging Tech is Redefining Customer Expectations.