The softer side of digital (p1)

I did a little talk earlier this week on the subject above. It was based on a presentation I pulled together for a thinktank for outdoor brands a few weeks back. The driver for the initial presentation was fairly simple - the attendees at the outdoor event were at a variety of different stages in terms of their digital channel maturity but the organiser's perspective was that most of them 'had spent the last 5 years trying to get their transactional sites sorted'. The premise for the piece therefore was to look at the changes in behaviour, in technology and in business and draw some conclusions on how to address them. The subtitle became 'building brands and relationships online' - primarily because this seemed the next phase for a lot of those present. Their digital past had been to identify digital as a channel that they needed to be in, but primarily as a sales channel. 

I thought i'd jot down some of the themes in a couple of posts before i forget them - this is the first one outlining a couple of different ways we looked at this to provide some context, before the second part which sets out some key concepts to bear in mind building brands online.

The first lens I thought about was that of online behaviour, of how people use digital technology. For me, digital has moved from second fiddle (an awkward alternative), to second nature (something we hardly think about). So digital is where we spend the most time, consume the most media, and it's where we hang out - so its where to find us. There are some great stats collated by google if you want to support making such a point some time.

From there I wandered into the changing face of technology. While we are already adopting this technology as fast as it can come and revelling in the digital hedonism of it all, actually technology is adapting to make things even easier for us. I'm thinking of natural user interfaces; gesture, facial and voice recognition and things like augmented reality that all close down the gap between people and machines.

So we have people getting into computers and computers getting into people. Nice. But from a business perspective all this online activity is empowering consumers and giving them a totally new degree of influence. That in turn is driving new business models and disruption with companies like Amazon, Groupon and iTunes changing the nature of the value chain in all manner of markets. For many of the manufacturer brands I was talking to, they are no longer in control of the means in which someone is likely to experience their product.What was once likely to be confined to retail environments they could control can now be found discounted, purchased in bulk, displayed inamongst other brands, compared on price, value or rating.

The short of all this is that the ever-growing digital landscape is where businesses can exert some influence on how their brand is perceived through their actions, and that this no longer means transactional ability but a much broader range of experiences that build relationships.

One of the most exciting things for me at the moment is that this is making marketing start to feel like marketing again (and less like Levitt's sales), to 'meeting the wants and needs of the consumers'. Not just in the sense of developing products that they want, but also in the sense of providing value that they might cherish, providing meaning beyond messages, and building lasting relationships. Through marketing we can make things people really embrace, enjoy or find useful in their lives and if we can keep it relevant the brand can enable the business to be profitable.