by Tom Goodwin
What does this mean for business?
1. An opportunity for everyone
All service companies should be offering customer service and information via IM. There are no excuses for this not being text enabled. From ordering dry-cleaning collections to booking haircuts and buying items from designers directly or even getting the news, our primary mode of transactions on mobile could be within IM. Just imagine the possibilities.
Location-based technology allows people to order a pizza for delivery to their current location. Technology such as application programming interfaces (APIs) allow messaging to become embedded with other overlaying services. For example, Facebook Messenger allows people to order taxis from Uber, book restaurant tables using OpenTable, or nearby cinema seats from the Fandango API, quickly and securely.
Many airlines now offer remarkably good service over Twitter. You can now easily use it to change seats or rebook flights or cancel tickets, but why use the clumsy interface of Twitter when IM is faster, more secure and personal? From renting cars, to seeing where the rental car is, to checking the bill, to submitting receipts for expenses, IM will be the best platform for everything.
2. Don’t conflate bots with IM
Chatbots are where two incredible and transformative technologies overlap: IM meets AI.
They are based on the concept and thinking of IM, and are powered by the engineering of AI. But the truth is they are not that good. The current state of AI, outside of the powerhouses of Google, Facebook, university labs and a handful of others, is most likely to be an advanced algorithm. In fact, the chatbot interfaces of today seem like a visualized user flow from a call-centre menu. Instead of ‘press 1 for Spanish’ and then ‘5 for customer service’ we most often see limited menus pre-set to fixed questions, that we can’t even try to bypass without causing issues. Type in anything close to a sensible sentence that hasn’t been pre-set, and you quickly go into error territory.
For sales, generating leads or converting interest, chatbots seem to be an especially poor solution. To spend hundreds of millions in advertising dollars in the hope that in one magical moment a potential customer makes the effort to contact you, and to then in this moment of wonder pass them to a computer because you can’t expend the power and cost of human interaction, seems particularly strange.
For customer service, when seen in this cost-savings context, the benefits of chatbots are more obvious to companies – transforming FAQ sections on websites into conversations, directing customer service questions to the best department, checking rates and opening times or updates on train routes or flights – the list of potential applications goes on.
Bifurcation of retail
Shopping is seeing the same split, moving from shopping as a ‘branded experience’ to buying as the ‘ultimate in ease’.
Buying is simplicity
I’m pretty sure no person in modern times has ever been so bored that they went window shopping on Amazon; the spartan CMS, the ugly product shots and the functional taxonomy have all been designed to make buying as easy and seamless as possible. But never fun.
Shopping on Amazon, when it works best, isn’t an experience; it’s a lack of experience. It’s unmemorable. I have bought books twice because I seemingly bought the first one in my sleep. It’s the purest example yet of the act of removing every possible barrier, every piece of friction. The end result of countless A–B tests to optimize for simplicity, speed and efficiency.
This is the world of buying. It’s the surgical operation of a system to reduce cognitive burden, to make decisions fast, facile and frictionless, if not automatic. The system was designed originally for people who know what they want and want to get what they need without thinking, yet it’s become the default way to acquire goods in the age of too much choice and too little time.
So increasingly the world of retail seems to work this way. We have product reviews spreading across retail with quick-to-glance stars to give us confidence. We have the Wi-Fi-connected Amazon Dash button, which allows us to procure items with a nonchalant poke.
Shopping is experiential
Even the most ardent M&M’s fan doesn’t believe the 25,000 sq ft of M&M’s World in Times Square, New York is there to satiate the cravings of New Yorkers for chocolate at 11:45 pm. Like all flagship stores M&M’s World is there to impart an experience. It’s shopping to be remembered, it’s a journey of discovery, it’s memorable, it’s there to take time and savour. It’s the opposite of buying.
Shopping is most often found in physical retail because it’s the easiest to do with sights and smells. Shopping is the world of adding experiences. It’s the interactive perfume lab in Selfridges, the selfie opportunities in Harvey Nichols, the Hardware Club experiences in Harrods or the extravagant fragrance laboratories of Le Labo. Coffee shops seem to have learned this: unnecessarily long wait, the drama of the brew, the theatre of the leather-bound menu in Intelligentsia Coffee.
Buying is what drives farmers’ markets and their stories of provenance, the handmade signs and the seemingly added dirt. It’s the lavender oil factory store in Provence, the oddly expensive wine store at the vineyard. Buying is the tailored suit made from Suit Supply where the consultation is part of the experience.
What to do about it
Move to one extreme to thrive. Retailers need to establish which type they want to be and work hard to maximize that. Either systematically reduce complexity at every turn, or add it in the most delightful way. Don’t get caught in the middle.
Young older people
Businesses are obsessed with Millennials. We talk endlessly about how to target them, how to make them feel at home in the working world, about how they behave, how they are different. Yet I think we’re after the wrong people. The over-50s have 80 per cent of the developed world’s wealth and yet we make zero effort to talk to them.
Millennials are not the creators and makers of all trends; life doesn’t start with them and move out.
We have another idea in marketing, that teenage years are formative, that we grow up to be loyal in later life to brands we experienced when we were young. The few brands I now care about (Rag and Bone, Virgin Atlantic, Design within Reach, Waitrose, Standard Hotels, Sonos, Tesla) have just come to me in the last year or so. This has always been the case. Brands change, products change, people change. This is not a cycle that is slowing. Quite the opposite.
I’m not sure if anyone in marketing has noticed, but old people don’t look or act like they once did. We’re moving from Victor Meldrew to Helen Mirren, a generation of incredibly energetic, fantastically confident, wise people who just happen to have pretty much all the money in the world and plenty of time to spend it.
References
Loras, S (2015) Why have QR codes taken off in China?, 15 November, available from: https://www.clickz.com/why-have-qr-codes-taken-off-in-china/23662/ [last accessed 11 December 2017]
Marketing Charts (2016) Digital devices now influence the majority of US in-store sales, 20 September, available from: https://www.marketingcharts.com/industries/automotive-industries-70812 [last accessed 11 December 2017]
The Economist (2016) Bots the next frontier, 9 April, available from: https://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21696477-market-apps-maturing-now-one-text-based-services-or-chatbots-looks-poised [last accessed 11 December 2017]
09
Preparing for the new world
In a book that’s full of bold statements and personal opinions, no chapter fills me more with dread, a sense that I’ll look idiotic in the future, than a chapter based entirely around predicting the future. The internet is ablaze with smart people making silly predictions, so why would I run the risk of making a fool of myself?
The answer is twofold. Firstly, I think it’s vital that companies start looking ahead more. We will spend all our life in the future, so it’s worth taking time to think about it and try to establish what we can and can’t predict and what confidence levels w
e have. And secondly, I’m concerned about the degree to which technology-led and data-driven people and culture seem to ‘own’ the idea of predictions. I see far too much written, so many clear projections, based on what appears to be remarkably little familiarity with the human race. So this chapter is here to help shine a guiding light into the future, help stimulate debate, show what we know but also what we’ve no idea about. This chapter is about helping people understand the future state that businesses, brands and people could face. I encourage you to use this to establish threats and opportunities and to leverage this to make proper changes now.
Looking further forward is more important than ever
If we look back from these accelerated times, we draw comfort from the knowledge that things have never changed so fast before. From new technology to changing consumer behaviour and media fragmentation, no wonder it feels difficult to keep up. Life has never been so fast.
The need to look ahead has never been greater. When you drive a car, or any vehicle, it seems sensible that the faster you are travelling, the further ahead you need to look. For decades, the prescribed answer has been agility. Companies adapted to change, with small nimble teams, comprising a mixture of specialists and generalists. But what if responding fast was now too slow? What if, in words widely attributed to former professional ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky, we skated where the puck is going?
If we are honest, how many roles in most companies have a forward focus? Typical jobs and processes are entirely based in the recent or distant past. Sales results capture the historical results of decisions made long ago; case studies showcase what agencies were capable of many years ago, from annual results to best practices; even forward planning exercises start with what’s been done before. We copy what our competitors have made today, when the gears of motion started long ago. If we copy that now, we will be too late. If there was such a measure, the collective focal point of marketing and business people is firmly in the past.
And who can blame them? The fastest way for me to lose all credibility in a room is to come close to mentioning anything to do with seeing the future. The science of ‘Futurology’ seems as dubious as that of Scientology. The world of business needs more than ever to change its focus. We live in the age of insurgents, who use last-mover advantage to deploy the latest, best and cheapest technology and who take advantage of new behaviours.
We need collectively to get better at future planning, and improve the way we establish what are fads and what are shifts. We like to pounce on the short, simple, little things. We’re quick to discuss Flappy Bird or Second Life, we instantly try to digest ChatRoulette, Meerkat, Periscope or Candy Crush, but often these things are not significant.
Instead, longer, more transformative, more human changes need to be understood. We need to understand what will last longer, have a greater material impact on business and commerce, customer service, economics and brands, and we need to plan accordingly.
So with that in mind, here are some ways to think more usefully about the future.
It’s about empathy not technology
Trends may appear to be driven by technology, but more often than not they are about reflecting humanity. We may think selfies are both highly contemporary and rather odd, but they reflect the human need to build a social network, express who we are and create a peer and support group. We may think social media is new, but even the caves in Lascaux had a ‘wall’. When you really understand people, you realize that it will be several generations before we’ll be wearing technology on our faces, because, for human beings, eye contact and facial expressions are too important to be covered. Humanity and technology jar against each other. Even more subtle worn technology like smartwatches have limited appeal because for many people the wrist is vital real estate to tell the world who you are. Many like to use it to show their refined tastes, others like to show social status and wealth, yet smartwatches today seem to broadcast the wrong things. As things stand, they show the user is fascinated, or rather self-obsessed, by technology, or that they need to be kept up to date with everything; I’m not sure how attractive these signals are to many.
The best way to understand the future is to understand primal man and woman. We are driven to want to tell the world who we are, to form social bonds, to procreate, survive, and to have shelter, food and safety in order to do that. Brands and companies built on those tenets of life will do well.
You have to feel and smell your way into understanding the future. The past is a good predictor of the future, but the real skill is knowing what won’t ever change and what is likely to. One of the hardest problems in life is navigating the territory between those who constantly cry that ‘this time it’s different’ and those who frequently bark ‘but we’ve seen this all before’. The way to deal with this is to just let your mind wander and let the dots join up.
Predictions are more about empathy and imagination than science. I’m lucky, as my role is based on travelling the world, listening and observing. You arrive in Paris to endless strikes from taxi drivers about Uber, you’re in India hearing people talk about the exploding middle class, you see kids in Rio’s favelas watching TV on a smartphone, or a self-service experience beyond what you ever expected in Oslo, and you start to feel your way through the world and life and see how things should and could develop and unravel.
I’m amazed how many terrible predictions are made about the future.
Amazingly, people who own Bitcoin predict it will do well. But these are not the people to ask; it’s in their self-interest to create a future where they will prosper. I see a lot of predictions based on how people will behave in scenarios they can’t even imagine. When you get a group of people to answer questions like ‘would you ever buy a self-driving car?’ or ‘would you trust a robot to look after you?’, you get entirely useless answers. Asking people for their opinions on things that don’t yet exist is naive in the extreme.
We love interpreting data in a linear fashion and it doesn’t work. The early uptake of the Amazon Echo can’t be modelled around that of the smartphone and interpolated. Data does an excellent job of mapping the past and the current, but a terrible job for those who need to look ahead. ‘Chartism’ is rife in all elements of futurology and, by and large, it never works. Interpolation of data would suggest 3D TVs would be taking over the world, that Sodastreams would be found in every house, that the world should have more smartphones than people by now, that we would spend 24 hours a day watching TV.
Many trends exist as actions and reactions. It’s the array of new technologies in our homes that make people in most countries demand more traditional housing that borders on pastiche. It’s the time freed up by using Walmart or Amazon or Tesco that makes us want to go to the farmers’ market (and it’s interesting to note that farmers’ markets are only ever in cities, never in the countryside). Because we ate lunch at our desk we want to cook tonight. Most trends have countertrends, and it’s by understanding this that we unearth where many opportunities lie. If our shopping becomes boring, where can we get fun back into life? If we’re staying the night in bland hotels, then how can businesses explore individuality?
Second-order and adjacent technologies
Innovation and progress never happen in a vacuum. It’s far from a scientific experiment with one variable fixed. The future of electrically propelled cars isn’t isolated against changes in software that allow self-driving cars to operate. Nor is it isolated against business models based on accessing rather than owning cars, or against a move towards businesses using improved telecommunications structures to allow more people to work from home, or the change in career expectations and personal goals that mean people may seek to freelance more.
The hardest thing about any prediction is seeing the unknown second- and third-order effects that nobody could have possibly calculated. As Carl Sagan said, and as supplemented by Kevin McCullagh’s analysis of key technology changes, ‘It was easy to predict mass car-owner
ship but hard to predict Wal-Mart’ (McCullagh, 2017).
Who saw the rise of the mobile phone and then predicted emojis? Benedict Evans has a fascinating argument that electronically propelled vehicles could save thousands of lives by reducing cancer deaths, because of the resulting vast reduction in gas station infrastructures that encourage the impulse buying of cigarettes (Evans, 2017).
We need to think of what will happen to flying when and if VR headsets take off. What will happen to mobile commerce in a world of 3D printing? What will happen to electronic scooters if we use multimodal transport apps? Unanticipated consequences are everywhere. If robots start taking over many human jobs, will they create more jobs in new fields, will we earn money from the taxes they pay on the income they generate for free? What happens to the meaning of life in this situation? Do we find more time to watch cat videos or finally get around to writing poetry and reading Russian literature?
The key to all predictions is to establish what all these dots do when aligned. It is balancing feeling with data, imagination with technology knowledge, fixing what’s certain and ideating around what is unknown. When you do that you can establish a cone of plausibility and that is where some of these longer-range views that follow have come from.
Anticipatory computing and seamlessness
Broadly speaking we’ve had three eras of the web so far, each defined by three distinct behaviours and each with their own winners and losers. It’s the next era where things get interesting.
The portal era
The first era of the consumer internet was the era of portals: the internet as a web-based magazine.
