Is business-to-machine (B2M) the next marketing frontier?
Marcom professionals could soon find themselves targeting devices, rather than people
Among the alphabet soup of marketing categories, if you’re a marcom professional you’re probably already familiar with the Big Three: business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), and business-to-government (B2G). But a fourth major category could be looming just over the horizon: business-to-machine (B2M).
At first blush, that idea may sound absurd. Or a work of science fiction. Or, at least, relegated to the distant future. Yet it’s a reality that could be approaching sooner than many marketers think. In fact, in the energy, mobility, and buildings sectors where I work, I’m already seeing the first hints of its coming.
What is B2M marketing?
At its core, the idea behind B2M marketing is simple: it involves strategies, messages, techniques, etc. that target smart devices, rather than human beings. It assumes that the customer whose opinion and business you want to ‘win’ is a machine, rather than a person. It’s not nearly as crazy as it sounds.
Two major technology trends are on track to converge in ways that could have big implications for forward-thinking marketers:
- Artificial Intelligence: the ability for machines (i.e., computers) to evaluate complex information and make decisions based on that data
- Blockchain: the ability for machines to enter into contractual relationships and make commitments with counter-parties
With these two pieces in place, machines can evaluate content and marketing claims, compare and contrast competitors, form ‘opinions’ about a company’s reputation, and ultimately make decisions about products and/or services… potentially all without the intervention of a human.
And if machines are the ones making the decision, the stage is thus set for the ‘computer brains’ in devices of all shapes and sizes — from the smart thermostat on the wall of my house to the electric vehicle charging in my garage — to become the target of marketing campaigns.
As my colleague Arno Laeven at the Energy Web Foundation writes, “What if companies’ interactions with their human customers were instead replaced by interactions with those customers’ smart devices?”
It’s not as far into the future as you might think.
If you’re feeling tempted to write this off as a bit of quackery, don’t. There are already early signs that such a future is becoming reality today.
For example, we’ve been reading for years about smart refrigerators that will be able to re-stock themselves, by placing orders for groceries when items start running low. Most descriptions of how that would actually work use some combination of a customer’s past order history (what was actually in the fridge and what did they previously buy), cameras, and sensors, as well as purchasing patterns (using machine learning algorithms to find new or different products that might work as well or better to replace whatever food is running out).
Why would marketers give away their own agency to such a scenario? Automatically re-purchasing a previously bought item and/or deferring to the algorithm of a Samsung refrigerator or Amazon grocery app leaves little room for a competitor to make their case for that business. But what if marketers could directly target that smart refrigerator, ‘convince’ it to choose their product when it places the next re-stock order, and earn that business?
We already empower our devices with agency.
As a society and as individuals, we already empower our devices with a surprising amount of agency on our behalf, often without thinking about it. It’s not such a huge leap to think that we’d divest more or less all our decision-making powers to our devices in the name of automation and efficiency.
Consider the ECO button found in many cars and on pretty much all smart thermostats. Whether it involves gallons of gasoline or kilowatt-hours of electricity, we are empowering the machine and basically saying, “Make some decisions on my behalf to save energy and do a little good for the environment.”
In today’s reality, that means that perhaps your car accelerates less aggressively to not burn through fuel as fast. Or maybe your thermostat relaxes the high- and low-temperature set points before it turns on your heating or cooling.
But in tomorrow’s reality, what if that same smart thermostat could automatically switch your home to an alternative rate option from your utility that would save both energy and money? Or what if you lived in a region of the country where you have choice in your retail electricity supplier, and the thermostat could choose the best option for you? And what if on top of that it could automatically enroll you in a program that wouldn’t affect the comfort of your home but could earn you a little extra cash for helping the utility manage peak energy demand on hot summer days when everyone is cranking their air conditioners?
In this future scenario, would it be simpler and easier for us marketers to target the thermostat directly? Could we skip the hassle and complexity of targeting the human, and cut them out of the loop? As our devices get smarter and better able to act on our behalf, the human becomes the increasingly unnecessary middle man between marketers and machines.
When machines become the end customer, full stop.
In most of the examples I’ve offered, even if us marketers target a machine, that machine is still acting on behalf of a human end customer. But what if the machine itself is the end customer?
That, too, may become a possibility.
(And no, I don’t mean like a pair of 2017 news stories when a robot named Sophia became an actual citizen of Saudi Arabia in a world first, or when another AI robot named Shibuya Mirai was granted official residence in Tokyo, Japan.)
Instead, think about the growing smart home trend. Increasingly, our homes are being filled with all manner of smart devices: smart home hubs from the likes of Amazon, Google, and Apple; smart lighting; smart thermostats; smart appliances. Although such devices are installed in a home, on an account level, they are ‘attached’ to a human being.
However, in the near future we may see smart home tech more fully integrated into the home instead. The point of attachment—the seat of identity, in a way—becomes the house, rather than the person. We are already seeing this with the advent of property assessed clean energy (PACE) programs for residential rooftop solar.
Once upon a time, if you installed rooftop solar on your house and later sold that house and moved, you’d either have to uninstall the solar PV system and take it with you or negotiate a separate sale / transfer to the new homeowners. That’s because the solar was considered separate from the house. But PACE ‘attaches’ the solar to the house, so if the house is sold, the rooftop PV seamlessly stays with the building, even though the human owners change.
I expect that smart home tech will eventually make a similar transition, becoming more fully attached to the house rather than the occupants. For marketers then, the challenge becomes winning the house’s business, regardless of any change in occupants or owners. The same may eventually be said for cars, as more and more of them become both autonomous (self-driving) and shared.
Where will B2M marketing arrive first?
I expect that B2M marketing will become near and present for three adjacent sectors: energy, mobility, and buildings. I may owe this perspective partially to my own bias as a marcom professional in those industries. But I also think objectively these are the three most-likely areas where the intersection of AI and blockchain will put machines into the proverbial driver’s seat.
Once that happens, it becomes only logical that we as marketers start targeting that new class of decision makers, giving rise to a new generation of marcom professionals who specialize in B2M marketing.
Which leaves just one big, lingering question: How the heck do you market to a machine? I don’t pretend to have that answer (yet). But I’m willing to bet it will be human marketers—not machines—that figure it out.
