First, let me tell you a story, I have a 3 years old daughter, who was born together with iphone 5 and grew up with a lot ipads and tablets around her, we bought total 5 iPads for the whole family, and 1 iPad is dedicated to be used to capture my daughter’s life… I know a lot parents don’t want their kids to use these devices too often, luckily my daughter is not the type of kids who holds these devices for games all day long, most of the time, she uses it to watch the photos and videos of herself, and the amazing thing is we didn’t teach her how to use it, like how to slide to unlock, how to swipe, how to pinch and tap, seems she knows these controls naturally (Salute to the apple UX designers!), and this happens when she is only one and half years old, while this is not over… one day, she broke one of my father-in-law’s antiques which cost quite some… so I started to scold her, and my father-in-law was still on her side and asked me to stop scolding her… while guess what this little girl did? she raised her hand and did this gesture to me, at first I was confused, but then I realised that she wanted to pinch me to make me smaller or disappear… lol…
so what does this story tell us? the next generation of consumers have been brought up in a world where not only are they exposed to these interactive devices, these devices have led to the changes in their life-style, way of communication and even their way of thinking, these consumers will have high expectations, to digital marketers or brands that fail to meet these expectations will definitely not be able to compete.
Following my last article “4 predictions about the future digital marketing”, with the raising of the new technologies like VR, speech recognition, gesture control, artificial intelligence and robots… the consumers are starting to build their own eco system into their personal life, for example, the TV nowadays are all equipped with the internet connection and internet streaming capability, everyday devices has been connecting to internet and this machine controlled eco system, like your sports sensor, door lock, light bubble, home camera… more and more are integrating into this centralized system.
The raising of this eco system is changing the user behavior, for example, for daily life like buying the groceries online, consumer might just need to schedule a routine job with their apps with AI engine, and the system will do these shopping automatically for human, so for digital marketers or brands who want their product to be part of this machine controlled eco system, they need to understand the user behavior change, and this change is going to be HUGE, for example, the current web analytic might not work in the example we mentioned above, how to make your products / brands stand out from others and get consumer choose you needs to be a different story… Do you still think this is far away? check out this Amazon Echo (Alexa)…
