This piece is written as part of a consultancy job for a now defunct brand.
We believe the era of a divide between digital marketing, ecommerce and their non-digital counterparts is about to end before 2020.
This natural evolution of doing business as a whole is led by a corporate digital transformation, a resurgence of human-centered thinking and service design. Embracing this change will shift the way we do business for the better.
Connected commerce, service and marketing
This digital transformation shift will also challenge the divide of product, sales, service and marketing. These classic pillars of every company will need to combine their efforts and insights by a unification of goals and deliberate intertwining of means to meet the needs of business, partners and consumers alike.
A great example for this is the ‘democratisation of products’ approach that Über deployed. Rather than separating the product from service, its offering is an intrinsic collaboration of service (finding, connecting and paying for a cab ride), partnerships and product (the cab ride) and marketing (social and W.O.M.).
We continually leads and invests into forging, connecting and perfecting the ever growing overlap of all physical and digital products, services, companies and insights. Our driver is to better serve people, which in its turn drives better business.
Human centred business by digital transformation
Businesses will need to build for everybody. Digital is not the sole domain of ‘early adapters’, hipsters or geeks.
In a human centred approach we build for normal people: connected, but not technology driven, critical, yet open for dialogue, demanding ease, quality and a fair price, but also open to learn and positively change the status quo. These people are our touch stone, we are these people.
To reach the point to optimally serve normal humans, we as digital frontrunners and our clients need to embrace processes like digital transformation as a proces to pave the way.
Digital transformation means a company wide change in thinking about products, services and the processes to create and offer them to people.
It wil not transform everyone into a digital native, but does help a company to truly delve into the power of an integrated digital company. It starts small, but through it’s effects it rapidly changes a company into a better version of itself.
Transavia and Coolblue are great examples where the digital transformation now is a continuing proces throughout the entire company. Constantly improving product and services based on the users needs, their core values and new opportunities in the market.
Digitally local: Marketing and commerce as a service
Marketing mechanisms will also change to a more human centered and service driven way of thinking. Think of exploring and learning about automated procurement, but also services where personal preference is central to all communication.
For example: the ‘local produce’ and bespoke packaging of commodity products is a sympathetic theme amongst retailers. It is also getting traction in the mainstream for fresh produce and luxury items. Ahold, Amazon and Hello fresh have rolled out large scale subscription- and selection based services of FMCG as an addition to their already existing service, or even as a core product.
Marketing communications also changes. In stead of sending a stream of messages to random target audiences, we believe that ’local is the new global’ fits better with means we have today. Smart and highly tailored communication nowadays is attainable for any company. Specifically for FMCG there are new opportunities to finally connect with its consumers.
The way parties like Hello Fresh market their product and monitor response increases their accountability every day. They moved away from reliance on ‘self targeting’ mass ad hedging systems, and other unsustainable models of pumping irrelevant content into an infinite media landscape. In stead they focussed on concise, relevant communications based on the quality of the product and value add through services and content.
Open information exchange between business and end user
Improving the marketing of products can be done by offering ease of procurement as a service. Personal preference data for example can be exchanged through an open interchange of information party like Apple, Google or even banks. This exchange serves a mutual benefit to improve the product, service and day to day goings-on between business and people, but also business to business.
With such sharing of information via a protected personal data cloud, it’s easier for people to effortlessly interact with their world without a constant demand to interact with screens, interfaces and the barrage of attention demanding, irrelevant content.
Learning from upcoming technologies like Internet of Things and ’federated small data’ is key. With learnings from these markets we now can seamlessly incorporate current and future technologies and physical infrastructures to add value on the product- and service value chain.
Your every day connection might now be done through mobile Apps, social media and the web, but in the near future it’ll be integrated into our life through embedded smart tech like NFC, dialogue driven assistants and secure open API’s.
Current example for this ease, empowerment and integration is the way services of Amazone, Google and Apple use the dialogue interface like Siri to exchange information. Using one hub, or common interface to connect numerous services like shops, media, communication etc proves to be very effective and is very interesting for any business.
Digitally local FMCG services
New opportunities also arise through massive improvements of local infrastructure in densely populated areas and opening up localisation information of delivery services such as Post.nl.
At the moment FMCG companies are forming new alliances to offer direct sales through customised subscriptions and bespoke selections, right at your doorstep. These services are offered via global partners like Amazon, bol.com and the like.
Baido, Amazon (once again) and many local Asian players broke loose from their original products- and services model, and opened up to integrate direct sale of FMCG, payment services and many more as the core of their service. Their business goal is to make any shopping experience seamless, open and transparent. Clearly human centred goals that also ensures succes for them and their partners.
‘Products as a service’ opens a lot of opportunities to market new products and offer products in a personal fashion. This way FMCG will partly change its model to a service industry with a strong product at the core.
Creatively coping with infinity channels, brands and projects
In a human centred world the human, our clients seems to rule all and subsequently break pretty much each standardisation and IT effort.
To cope with, -nee- accelerate this corporate necessity, we see that strong fragmentation of all corporate processes and infrastructure is a given. In the past this would block any scaling of successful initiatives. It seems however the tide has turned.
Through highly flexible, open structured and growable infrastructure components any initiative can nearly realtime grow and wane, depending on demand of the market. Fitting the company with similar flexible and pluggable components in internal processes is however critical.
Transformation to better serve all
In short: True integration of digital within any company starts with digital transformation where all aspects of doing business is driven by a human centred approach.
Digital transformation is aimed to learn and use insights, digital infrastructures and embedded systems to drastically better the way we do business with each other.
For 2020 we foresee changes in all aspects of doing business, powered by this digital transformation, by integrating marketing, commerce, products and service to an interdependent ecosystem with better tools to serve us all and enjoy the best products how, when and wherever we like.