Written by Hossain Shahriar

“The future is already here” - William Gibson

This paper delves deep into how brands of the future must be forged in an interactive and evolving society that we live in.

Introduction: The Society We Live in Today

We Live in the Age of Interaction

The proliferation of the Internet, with Web 2.0 and social media, has significantly altered the configuration of our lives and disrupted the landscape of brand management (Christodoulides, 2009; Fournier & Avery, 2011; Gensler et al., 2013). These “new media” provides brands with new-fangled tools to “reach consumers”, listen to their real-time interactions, “communicate with them” and gauge their “communication, browsing or purchase-related behaviour” (Gensler et al., 2013; Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010, p.312). The age of interaction provides brands with “multiple touch-points” to “facilitate conversations” (Christodoulides, 2009; Singh & Sonnenburg, 2012).

How This Has Made Consumers More Powerful

Social media has empowered consumers (Gensler et al., 2013) and as a result the balance of power has shifted from businesses to consumers (Christodoulides, 2009; Fournier & Avery, 2011). Consumers mastered these “interactive technologies” (Christodoulides, 2009) to use brands for their own motivations to:

enhance their benefits
share their stories and excitements about brands (Gensler et al., 2013)
“aggregate perspectives” using mediation devices (Arvidsson & Caliandro, 2015).
help resolve product issues of others (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010).
influence others (Ericsson ConsumerLab, 2015a).
turn “brand messages” into parodies (Gensler et al., 2013)
complain about brands, expose their inadequacies and systematically annihilate them (Fournier & Avery, 2011)

The Society Will Continue to Evolve

Now that we live in a fast-paced age of interactivity, where consumers are very powerful, brands are threatened by ‘Digital Darwinism’, as “society and technology is evolving faster than brands can adapt” (Tarnovskaya, 2016b). Brands of the future, hence, needs to have the following ingrained in their DNA. They must:

win key consumer moments in a mobile-first society
be connected and collaborate with other brands
be more personal than ever

Mobile-First & Micro-moments

We live in a mobile-first society. We wake up, pick-up our smartphones, carry them around everywhere we go, without letting them out of our sight, until we go back to sleep. We expect information to be at our fingertips (Google, 2016a). People are conditioned to search on their smartphones to meet their immediate needs.

Mobile has essentially altered how people consume media (Ramaswamy, 2015) and hence fragmented consumer journeys into bursts of “real-time, intent-driven, micro-moments” (Google, n.d.) “of curiosity, research, and decision” (Lawson, 2016a). Coined by Google, micro-moments are intent-rich moments when a person reflexively, acting on an impulse turns to the nearest device to act on a need – to learn something new, make a decision or get things done (Google, n.d., 2016a, 2016b). Click here to watch the micro-moments video

Micro-moments provide brands with innumerable opportunities to connect with consumers (Lawson, 2016a) “on their most personal devices” (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010, p.321). This is crucial for brands because in these moments decisions are taken and preferences are shaped (Google, n.d.; Ramaswamy, 2015). Google identified four “critical touchpoints within today’s consumer journey” (Adams, Burkholder & Hamilton, 2015) that next-generation brands needs to focus on (shown below).

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Brands of the future must win these four key micro-moments with the four following strategies (Adams, Burkholder & Hamilton, 2015; Gevelber, 2016; Google, n.d.; Ramaswamy, 2015)

Be Pre-emptive

Brands should evaluate all stages of the consumer journey to pinpoint a set of must-win moments. The figure below exhibits five-ways of doing this. Brands need to understand what consumers want: when they wish to find inspiration, learn about products or buy something.

Be There

Studies have shown that most consumers are loyal to their needs-in-the-moment and not necessarily to brands. Companies should identify and prioritise brand-related and category-related moments and ensure their presence, when these moments transpire. This will improve brand awareness among potential consumers.

Source: (Adams, Burkholder & Hamilton, 2015)

Be Useful

Brands need be useful to consumers’ needs-in-the-moment to be able to shape their perceptions. To satisfy people brands need to connect them to the relevant information they are seeking. They must delve-deep into the moment and envisage how to “deliver the right experience” tailored for that moment using “contextual signals” such as “location or time of day”. See the Starbucks example below.

Source: (Adams, Burkholder & Hamilton, 2015)

Be Lightning-Fast

Companies needs to deliver a fast and seamless mobile experience for users who wants to “know, go, do, or buy” quickly, in the moment. Consumers expect brands to deliver right things, right away.

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CSL_CITATION { "citationItems" : [ { "id&qu… — *Source:* *(Adams, Burkholder & Hamilton, 2015)*

Connected & Collaborated

People are now more connected than ever and devices are inextricably woven into our daily life. Brands can now engage across a symphony of devices. Next-generation brands must realise that retention will only come through reiterated interaction.

Cross-Device

A recent study by Google (2016a) showed that 57% people use multiple devices, sometimes concurrently. Brands need to understand consumers’ device usage behaviour (higher usage would mean more touchpoints), providing them a gateway to ‘be there’ in the moments (see above) that matter (Gevelber, 2013; Google, 2016a). Tomorrow’s brands need to possess hyper-mobility, enabling consumers to navigate across screens to accomplish things.

Connected Life Platforms

The connectivity, power and intelligence of computing is dripping “from our devices into our objects” (Wilson, 2011). ‘Connected life platforms’ or the Internet of Things (IoT) are a plethora of smart, connected, “physical objects, seamlessly integrated into the information network”, forming an ecosystem, that constantly interacts with consumers and “generates actionable insights” (Dubash, 2016; Eagle, 2015; Haller, Karnouskos & Schroth, 2009).

Brands of the future should use an array of surrounding smart and connected devices to interact with consumers in real-time and create touchpoints. Companies should create a lifestyle around the consumer and constantly engage with them to make their life easier. Connected platforms would provide businesses with a myriad of data that can be used to glean insights to provide an enhanced consumer experience (Google, 2015; Martin, 2016), leading to a long-term relationship between brands and consumers. Applications of the IoT is ubiquitous. Nevertheless, next-generation brands should specifically focus on the following

Human

People are increasingly using devices to attached to or inside their body (Manyika et al., 2015). People are donning smart-wearables such as smart-watches and fitness-bands. Wearables are even more intimate than smartphones and will shape the future IoT (Ericsson ConsumerLab, 2016). ‘Internables’ are next-generation health-monitoring and disease management technology, embedded with “micro-cameras” that are navigating in human bodies (Chui, Löffler & Roberts, 2010).

Connected Homes

A connected home is one that provides household services, crowded with smart sensing devices, enabled by wireless connectivity (Ericsson ConsumerLab, 2015b). It gives people the control of their homes, within their fingertips. Examples are Samsung SmartThings, Google Nest, Apple HomeKit. Next-generation brands should identify key housing requirements and focus on those that will make their consumers’ lives easier.

Retail

Businesses can personalise (see below) their customer’s in-store experiences by through interacting using the IoT. For example, companies can send stimuli to customers to convert their browsing, based on their waiting time (Dubash, 2016). Click to watch Nike Digital Retail Experience and Rebecca Minkoff Connected Store

Collaboration

To be constantly connected with consumers, brands of tomorrow must join-forces with other brands to grow. Cooperation will help brands to:

gain access to others’ proprietary assets or technology
expand product offering
traverse unchartered markets
proliferate awareness among new customers
disrupt with a new business model

Wind (2008) exhibited the global collaboration of Nike and Apple, who share similar customers (athletes who enjoys music while running or working out). The collaboration began in 2006 with Nike+iPod (which connected Nike+ footwear with the iPod that transmitted activity data from sensors) and is still going strong as they recently launched the Apple Watch Nike+.

Personalised

Society is becoming more individualistic as people are becoming more narcissistic. Companies are increasingly focusing on consumers to identify and facilitate their peripheral needs (Duffy, 2016a). Social media has aggravated the self-centredness of this image conscious, “Me Me Me Generation” (Stein, 2013). The seminal work of Schau and Gilly (2003) showcased the notion of ‘conspicuous self-presentation’ and how people “construct a digital-self”. Tarnovskaya (2016a) illustrated that social media provides us with tools not only to present our ‘self-image’ to express our identity (Christodoulides, 2009; Smith, Fischer & Yongjian, 2012), but also to construct a ‘façade’, based on the desire to be perceived positively by others. Click here to see a video on how people embellishes on social media.

We live in a society of unlimited information but limited attention (Montecchi, 2016). The days of ‘mass-targeting’ using ‘mass-media’ would be over, and brands should craft strategies and communication tailored to individual customer focusing on how to delight them. Brands need to move from ‘mass exaggeration’ to ‘individual exaggeration’. Brands of tomorrow would not sustain by merely gratifying the functional needs of customers, they need to be delighted at an emotional level. Hence, brands need to personalise offering to fuel the exaggerated personality and narcissistic needs of future consumers and make them feel special. Next-generation brands must forge personal relationships with their customers. “It is no longer just choosing the right mass media to reach the people. Today people are your mass media” (Duffy, 2016b).

The IoT is gradually transforming into the Internet of Me (IoM), signifying that our online experiences are becoming deeply personal (Hodkin, 2016). Brands should learn to deploy the IoM using contexts to transform consumer problems; e.g., Starbucks’ mobile order app finds the nearest outlet, sends the order there and inform the customer when and how to reach there (Eagle, 2015).

Duffy (2016a) discussed how hyper-personalisation can make brand messages more like a value-added personalised service, rather than a nuisance. For example, Amazon revolutionised mining and using data to provide a more “curated shopping and browsing experience”, providing customers with relevant recommendations. Fitbay is an online community that offers clothing tailored to their customers’ measurements (Roncha, 2016). Next-generation brands must hyper-personalise their communiqué and become more relevant to their customers by (Ramaswamy, 2014):

Listening

Social media and the IoT are crucial in both amassing personal data and delivering personalised content across devices (see above). Brands need to leverage the availability of personal information by adaptive listening and learning from browsing history, previous purchases, social media (Facebook provides detailed analytics), Google and internal customer data to hyper-personalise (Barwise & Meehan, 2010; Ramaswamy, 2014; Raut, 2016).

Analysing

Duffy (2016a) talked about how next-generation brands should use big data, analytics or “smart natural-language-processing technology” (Barwise & Meehan, 2010) to garner customer data and turn them into actionable insights in real-time.

Acting

Brands must have the capability to use insights to deliver personalised and relevant content. Technology giants like Google and Apple are investing profoundly in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (Metz, 2016). Next-generation brands must build capability to employ these sophisticated technologies.

Conclusion

As devices proliferate, consumers increasingly get information, entertainment and offering whenever they want (Google, 2015). These fast-paced transient moments of decision making are continuously transpiring every day and the more connected people are, the more these micro-moments transpires (Google, 2015). Brands that best meet the needs in each of these moments “with quality, relevance and usefulness” would win (Google, n.d.). A networked constellation of devices would provide brands with more data to unlock meaningful insights. This, in turn, would enable them to deliver superior and personalised experiences to cater the increasingly narcissistic needs of next-generation consumers.

Next-generation consumers expect convenience, seamless and relevance (Trend Watching, 2016). Forward thinking businesses should always plan ahead (Bennie et al., 2011) and persistently look other innovative ways to build brand.

However, building connected and personalised brands for the future runs the risk of complexity, being over-connected, fragmentation, clutter and data breach in consumers’ lives (Ericsson ConsumerLab, 2015b, 2016; Kasriel-Alexander, 2016). This raises the question whether the risk of providing a myriad of personal information to brands, just to make life easier, is worth it.