Presentation given at Airline Conference in Singapore, January 2012 at Marina Bay Sands.
Mainly I was talking about the 'post-platform world'. What's that you ask? Well read the deck and all will become clear. I hope...
What is planning?Know the magic: Really it means â know whatâs possible. Be at the frontiers not just in terms of technological change but also in terms of cultural change. The world is changing fast right now, economically and demographically and technologically. Know the User: this is about understanding our customers. Using research to discover new and revelatory insights that can help unlock innovation and growth.Finally, connecting the two. Bringing the magic and the customer together. This quote is from Andy Berndt.And this is the broad structure of my presentation today. Iâm going to show you a few examples of what I consider to be the new magic, and a few examples of how consumer behaviour is changing. And maybe gesture at a few ways we might begin to connect the two.
So, Post-platform. Whatâs that?What we mean by post-platform is the end of MONOPOLY by a lot of the established distribution platforms which we have for a long time taken as permanent.Content distribution, information distribution, product distribution.
We mean this.Desktop PCs getting thrown away. TVs getting thrown away. Maybe even laptops. To this pile you could add any number of other things: stereos, books, physical retail spaces. Iâm not saying these things are dying out but the absolute need for these platforms is changing.Rieplâs Law â new technologies seldom wipe out old ones, they just combine and complement to create new behaviours.Why?
This quote sums it up. Because the internet, the web, whatever we want to call it, is changing. The old idea of the web as something you look at on your desktop PC is falling away.The web instead is something which will be all around us, an environment of information surrounding us, accessible in any place, at any time, through as it says here a multiplicity of devices. For many people right now, that means the mobile phone. But already the spread of devices is increasing: the tablet, the e-reader, the handheld gaming unit, the mp3.
The screens, as this quote so nicely puts it, keep multiplying. And we find reasons to need them all.
Demonstrates Rieplâs Law. The point with all these screens is that they are not replacing each other. This whole thing of â2-screeningâ, where youâre watching the latest episode of whilst simultaneously chatting with other fans about it, or following a news story whilst seeing what the people on the ground say about it, is one example. But do we really think it will stop at 2-screening?
One of the biggest drivers of all this of course is mobility and some facts you may well be aware ofâŠ
Of course this is relevant to retail. This quote from Amazonâs Jeff Bezos is from 2010!
But itâs not just driven by mobile connectivity.The other key driver Iâd like to share today is what I call âeasily engageable environmentsâ. We talked about the web as now an environment of information surrounding us, following us around.Things like touch-screen being ever more prevalent â 3 quarters of smartphones to be touchscreen only by 2016. But beyond that more flat surfaces are becoming screens and more of these are becoming interactive. Shop windows, restaurant tables, you name it. Microsoft Surface and NECâs X-Info table. Relatively low-cost, Samsung have a large touch-screen table product which will retail at less than 10,000 US dollars.Others â natural language processing such as Siri.And the endless potentials of near field communication and RFID.
So what kind of magic can we create with this technology?Well thereâs lots of things which we can now deliver everywhere.
Chinese translation app in Schiphol and CDG airports. More than 1000 signs across the 2 airports to help the growing numbers of Chinese travellers.
Many of you may have seen this, if not I encourage you to take a look at the case studies you can find on YouTube.Tesco Homeplus in South Korea. They created virtual stores like the one you can see here on the subway.This is an exact mock-up of the store, the only difference is that shoppers make purchases using their smartphones and QR codes, with the products they scan going straight into their online shopping baskets.There was a nice thought in their strategy about turning waiting time into shopping time and of course this is something which we want to do with airline passenger experience. To me, thereâs no reason why this kind of thing should not be implemented around all the waiting times in airline travel.
Unilever Lipton encouraged people to like Lipton on Facebook using NFC⊠You interact with the billboard to like the brand and also to get offers and promotions.
This is maybe the most exciting to me. Sekai Camera from Japan. This effectively enables consumers to virtually âtagâ the world around them, in just the same way as you can tag your photos online. So, you hold your phone, tag an area of the image and then anyone can see the tags you have left. I could tag certain stands or areas in the conference today and you would be able to see my comments and thoughts. You can see all the opportunities for this both in the airport and also in the broader context of travel â traveller tips, recommendation, information. Brands can get involved in this too.
Payment everywhere. Another big implication of NFC will be the gradual move toward cashless payment. This is at shelf payment from the US.
Lastly, we can put content everywhere. This is the âStreet Museumâ app from the Museum of London. Simply by holding your phone up to your environment, you can see what London looked like hundreds of years ago.
One point I want to make is that this stuff isnât just about wireless, it doesnât always require mobile connectivity. This is a neat example from Honda in the UK where content becomes more engaging and 2-screening becomes possible without requiring internet access. Consumers at some point download an app to their phones, tablets or computers and then when they view Honda content, the app is triggered by specific sounds. This kind of technology could enable you to make inflight content deeper, to enable 2-screening without connectivity, and also to tie retail pushes and promotions to specific points during inflight content.
So thatâs the stuff we could do, the magic if you like.What about the consumers â how are they changing with all this stuff?
A big point I want to make is that they are no longer content with limited variety.We found this stat surprising when working for a recent client.
And as I have shown with much of what I have talked about, gradually we are moving beyond the bounds of the simple Google search. Asking friends and social groups â social recommendation â I will talk about in a moment, but live visual searching rather than textual searching will soon become very important.
What all this adds up to is what I call âultimate impulse buyingâ. Shazam is a great example â you hear a song, the app recognizes it and within seconds you can purchase and download that song.Likewise I might see a nice coat on a stranger in the street, visually search for it and make the purchase within moments.
But, there is an added complexity here.This idea of ultimate impulse buying goes against this idea of what Google call the zero moment of truth.You may have heard of P&Gâs theory of the âfirst moment of truthâ â this idea that up to 70% of purchase decisions are made at point of sale.Google produced data to show that â due to the increasing trend for researching product decisions online prior to shopping â more and more decisions were made before entering the store, at home. What they called the zero moment of truth.
But look at this representative trend line of some data I found.As Google suggested, the % of decisions being made before shopping was increasing over the last few years, but now that trend has begun to reverse.Why? My theory.Because of the mobile.People are still doing all the research but increasingly they are doing this live, in you store, at your point of sale. More and more decisions are being made at point of sale but that is done on a more and more informed basis â probably not the 3-7 seconds of P&G.
And a bigger and bigger part of this is social recommendation, what we can call social shopping.
Particularly for the younger demographic, as this data from a JWT study shows.
This is an example of some work we did for a local independent retailer which made use of this.If you are talking about an environment with limited stock capacity like a plane, what about something like this
And there are others such as the Delta Ticket Counter where you can not only buy tickets but also share travel plans etc on Facebook. Travel planning becomes social.
Macyâs Magic Fitting Room: In September 2010,Macyâs showcased the âMagic Fitting Roomâ at its flagship Herald Square store in New York. The kioskâs mirror was linked to a touch-screen tablet computer, and shoppers scrolled through selected items, chose which pieces to âtry onâ (these were then superimposed on the shopperâs image) and shared the results via Facebook, email and text to find out what their friends thought of the various outfits.NOTE: Image linked to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1rUdTITGCg
So finally, a simple model for thinking about how we use all this stuff.There are 3 key steps in the new consumer purchase journey.SEE â the greater number of screens makes more and more opportunities to see our products. And by screens I donât just mean tablets, I mean everything â like Tesco used the subway walls.LEARN â 2-screening and interactivity. Give people the chance to get deeper information on your products and add a social aspect to this. As the Honda example showed, this can even be done when there is no connectivity.BUY â and then buy. Even before we get to mass acceptance of cashless payment, the possibilities for enabling âbuy anywhereâ technology are huge.By thinking about ways we can help the consumer to do more of these 3 things, I believe we can find more opportunities to connect the magic, to the user.