How are companies preparing for Bachelor Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Last year on the world of consumerism.
November is at the door, and you know what that means … The annual shopping craze has arrived. The new global holidays that are crossing countries, beliefs and religions are approaching. Get ready for Chinese Bachelor Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. All year we are exposed to concepts of drowns and robots that will do the deliveries or concept stores instead of clothing stores. So we were thinking about sorting out what’s really going on in the consumer world (because concepts are great but what can we do with it?) And here are three things you need to start implementing … because the market is already there.
Customer experience as a business model.
The concept of user experience is already a concept we all use. We use it in every little thing we create to understand all the points of friction we touch on our customers. The ultimate goal? Do not disturb the user. Reduce friction points between the platform and the product. So how does a user experience go from value-added to business model? Research companies and digital transformation consultants have realized the power of the concept of user experience, not only in companies that sell products but also in industries. In the industries? Yes, in the industries.
A company that delivers millions of products on Chinese Bachelor’s Day optimizes its containers or on-demand production line, monitors production lines to detect when the machine is about to break down, they can cut shipping times, customers will be satisfied and the company will maximize profits. A few days ago Ali Express announced that it was going to improve its shipping services and it promised that the shipments would arrive at the customers’ homes within two weeks. Improved Premium Express Shipping. (Link)
The consulting/research firms are whispering to the ears of the executives and causing huge scale changes in companies, and these changes are finally rolling out to consumers.
Let’s face it — every year consulting/research companies publish forecasts for the coming decade, don’t get confused, these are not forecasts, these are areas where companies are going to invest.
This is not a case of “reality-creating thought” but an investment forecast that anyone who follows these forecasts can keep themselves at the forefront of technology.
So it’s certainly not surprising that at the beginning of the year Accenture, Deloitte, PWC and IBMX (which are 4 of the world’s leading consulting / research companies), for the first time entered the world’s top 10 agencies with a combined profit of more than 13 billion $ (!). Accenture Digital has acquired the Australian advertising company Droga. This move marks the beginning where a user experience becomes a business model. We will slowly see how creative people get into domains that are not just advertising and campaigns. Creative people will begin to be part of the overall solutions that consulting firms offer to the leading companies that drive our economy forward.
Creative thinking leads large organizations to invest in areas that do not seem to be related to the company’s essence, such as McDonald’s, which started with high-quality food and moved to real estate (the land acquisition on which its branches are opened) and recently McDonald’s has become another corporation that acquires a company that deals with language analysis and voice recognition. Why? so you can order products and think there is a service representative on the other side, or another app for the smart homes just say McDonald’s and order on the way.
Brands out — Feelings in.
If only the perfume companies used to do concept commercials that should connect emotion and product. Today everyone understood that consumer culture is essentially an emotional culture.
People consume products based on a sense of desire to belong, a desire to join something that is greater of them or a desire to feel close to someone or something.
And for the world of products and brands, aim their strategies. Today, terms are beginning to change. The MVP — minimum viable product switches to MLP — most lovable product, the system design switches to feeling design. Everything is directed in the direction of emotion and experience.
The Brands are trying to reduce themselves to one simple hallmark. This oneliner is nice but not necessary. Take Puma, for example, Puma’s latest campaign — the logo redesign competition. You can relax, the new logo does not replace the existing logo on the whole brand itself, it will only appear on the Instagram page.
So why is it good? Given that they have more than 10 million users on the platform and an entire generation that lives only on social platforms there is a more likely possibility that young people will be exposed to the new logo only and not the traditional logo. A bold step that definitely separates target audiences by their digital consumption habits. Another example of how branding moves into the world of experiences and emotion can be found in the recent Airbnb collaboration. You know you want to go on vacation, you already know Airbnb now you just ask yourself … Where?
Airbnb and 23andme offer you the opportunity to find your own story. 23andme is a company that specializes in genetic testing and offers to find out your ancestors arrived, so, for the most part, we will find that our previous generations came from places we didn’t even think of. Then Airbnb will enter the picture and you can embark on an emotional journey in the ultimate connection to your private story (or more specifically to your emotion).
The project:
Alongside brands, generic products are slowly becoming experiences. Museums are taking a step toward digital as you can see in a Tokyo team lab performance, ice cream is already being marketed at an ice cream museum that plays on colors and sensations, and personalized book photography marketed as a custom confetti experience the main theme is what you want to celebrate …
Here are two different experiences to watch — pay attention to the platform everyone has chosen to market their experiences (products). Because a picture (or short video) is worth more than a thousand words …
Team lab — Tokyo
the confetti project
Influencers.
If we talked about Instagram before and that a picture is worth more than a thousand words, then how many words is worth a short video… with some music…? Today’s youth and children have long been consuming their content differently than we thought. We would expect them to consume content on Facebook but they were on YouTube. We chased them on YouTube and here they are no longer there … Let’s figure out where they are.
Today more and more products and brands are turning to social networks where the average age is lower to reach the customer at an early age.
The Tiktok app, formerly known as Musical.ly, is no longer just a dance app. We are seeing more and more influencers opening accounts on the platform and using music (if any) as an element that only accompanies their next tutorial. With 41 percent of users between the ages of 16–24, Tiktok is slowly becoming the next YouTube of funny / tutorial videos. They become shorter and more focused.
So why do background music actually capture the young audience? few reasons.
- The video owner does not have to pay copyright to music (YouTube will block sound copyright videos).
- The sound represents a period spirit and a vibe that defines the character of the creator, you will not find Pink Floyd sound or Depeche Mode for example.
- For psychological reasons, the rhythm of music is used as a metronome. Something that makes you watch the video. The division into short musical bars makes you not stop in the middle. Exactly for the same reason that sometimes a specific song plays out of our minds for a whole day.
A few numbers so we can understand the extent of the phenomenon — with more than 500 million users and more than 188 million app downloads, it becomes one of the leading social networks.
At the moment everything is experimental, the platform advertising model is experimental and changes every short period of time for optimization. Brands and products are currently learning how to integrate into the platform in a relatively organic way. It is difficult for large organizations to get in there, so they use influencers who control traffic and set the agenda on the new social network. The right hashtag can take you to hundreds of millions of viewers.
For example, Puma just opened a page … not following anyone, posting nothing. Just a blank page. It will be interesting to see their learning process with each posting and publication. Nike has opened an account it has only one post and it is not exposed to all users if you want to follow the page you have to wait for approval, which makes the users almost feel like a club member. Wonder how long it will last. In the meantime, they have almost 300,000 likes and nearly 150,000 happy followers and remember — they only have one post.
Here is an example of Trend and Brand. Trend Haribo — Haribo is a company that produces delicious rubber teddies. The leading trend right now in Tiktok is a song combination of Adele (represented by Rubber Bears) singing a sentence and all the audience (also represented by Rubber Bear) singing the following sentence … Who creates the biggest audience gets more visibility … I was happy to find the sales figures before and after the challenge … what does it look like? Here’s a grape-flavored Adele with an audience of more than 200 teddy bears with over 2 million likes and over 31,000 comments.
the adele post:
In summary, we can see that in the consumer world there is a quiet change. Digital transformation is no longer really about introducing new systems but dealing with large amounts of data and understanding of that data. The user experience becomes the core of the corporate and brand business plan.
Considering all the data from the production line to the delivery of the product and not just the shopping experience has proven to increase the profit margin for companies. Also over the past year, we have seen how emotion becomes data and how that data is marketed to us through the experiences or eyes of marketing professionals who speak directly to us. We call them influencers. They must be the age of those who need the product, regardless of whether it is a product for 4-year-olds or a product for 50-year-olds. Companies remain to determine the values and those who represent the same values.
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