Digital is expanding yet again, from the first editorial version, to a second social version and now the third installment; integration.

Some arguments:

1. Integration is not merely about offering services where people are, it’s about implementing connected technology within our everyday objects, or designing new objects based on the new opportunities and additional meaning introduced by technology.

Which gives that this could introduce a completely new generation of needs and behaviors: In the words of Donald Norman;

“Need is created by technology, not the other way around.” Link.

2. With integration we are not only moving from destination sites to aggregate sites, from horizontals to verticals. We are moving from screens to objects, from input devices to sensors and from keyboarded instruments to everyday life.

Jesko Stoetzer’s RFID Sleeve prototype for the Betacup project is a good example. Showing how digital technology, using no screens, no keyboards, just an electronic augmentation and a redesign of an existing object, the cup sleeve. Can improve the coffee experience for enthusiasts, create new business opportunities and increase product sustainability.

3. Microsoft put it carefully in its Europe Logs on Report in April 2009:

“The use of Internet on PC’s will decrease from 95% today to only 50% the next five years.” – pdf

But Microsoft was only talking about our connected lives moving from PC’s to mobile, gaming platforms or “connected TV-boxes”. They where not looking into the emerging opportunities from smart objects, SPIMEs or coffee sleeves.

The Europe Logs on report were looking at machines. But the days when only machines were connected to the Internet is already in the past.

There is an important distinction to make in order to arrive at the conclusion that we are moving into a new Internet era, and that is the one between the machine and the object. What Russel Davies, in his talk “Printing the Internet out and squirting it into things” at the Lift Conference calls the device and the object.

Devices are machines where the structure of the object itself affords no utility, but there is a screen and a circuit board in there offering us a range of opportunities. And object is different, it already has an immediate utility, but technology ads a new layer of meaning.

“Devices fool us because they look like objects and do all this stuff, and we are kind of hypnotized by their ability to do all this stuff. Where as when you see an ornament in the shop you know exactly what it is and what it is for. And you don’t except more of it. I think some of the delights that some of these can contain is when it looks like a simple object but contains meaning that you weren’t excepting.” – Russel Davies.

4. Machines are hubs. Take the mobile phone as an example; it should be (and hopefully will be) connecting people to their objects, not filled with an application for each one (object).

Appvertising and applications belong to machines, and are just scratching the surface of connected technology, it is by and far only the answer to the following question: “What do people want access to all the time?”

Integration as a term is not about access, it’s about turning everyday objects into identities, which enables them to organize, create structure and through feedback add a new layer to spaces in our everyday life.

Bill Moggridge mentions in his book Designing Interactions, that there are not only three (spatial) dimensions to an interface, but also a fourth one; time. We are now building a fifth dimension; the digital identity of the physical object.

The digital life of physical objects is what Kevin Slavin discusses in his talk This Platform Called Everyday Life at the PSFK Conference in New York. This quote where he references a video of a cat molesting a Webkinz:

“This cat is completely unaware of the most important thing about this particular stuffed animal. Which is that it has a whole other life online. This is a Webkinz stuffed animal. And this cat has no idea. It thinks it’s actually engaging with the thing, and in fact it has a whole parallell life thats going on, that this cat can’t touch. And I want to make it clear, that this is where we are heading, towards a world in which entities have this physical presence as well as this digital presence.”

Conclusion:
The important shift with integration is not that we put technology into things (devices), but that everyday objects with an existing physicality and purpose, get a new dimension and additional meaning: A digital identity.

With these identities comes data, responsiveness, organization and connection.

The next generation is all about connecting our stuff, offering new layers of meaning to our objects, our situations and the world at large.

In research just made public by one of the major banks in Norway, businesses where asked why they were investing in an online presence. The answers presented a bit of a revelation.

The top three answers were all connected with consumer demand, which are all OK points to make, but when compared to the three least popular responses, all linked to business incentives, it seems the focus has been turned a bit up-side-down. It seems businesses are more focused on doing what their customers say, at a cost, rather than doing it for themselves – doing stuff where the company has identified a direct business advantage from having a presence online and want to take advantage of the opportunity.

- This cost-driven strategy might also explain the dreary state of Internet offers today. Where most companies find being just as good as every other brand in their category is good enough – there is no money in it!

THIS IS IMPORTANT, because we are overly focused on talking about people and staring into this black box of consumer habits and behaviors. With extensive demands being added by social media, demand that only a few companies find interesting enough to take on. (It’s more “Lets avoid a mistake”-thinking than “This is an opporuntiny”-thinking as Jon Steel would have said)

But this is hopefully all about to change…

The next generation of online activities will be inherently linked to business advantage, rather than consumer demand. And by that we should also see the real money being poured in, not just marketing pocket lint.

Interesting? This is a good start: Business Model Generation.

Digital’s introduction to retail, be it a slow one, will accelerate as the understanding of the width of web and mobile broadens from being all about destinations, to integration into every aspect of business:

Find the presentation below or at slideshare.net/helgetenno.

As always find the individual slides under CC-license here: flickr.com/everythingnewisdangerous

I’ve included the part of the script describing the three areas of retail I’ve concentrated on; product, in-store and business opportunities:

Product opportunities
The product is not just a “brand” living on a shelf or being consumed by a member of the public. It is a character, which within the framework of a strong identity changes its characteristics to fit different roles through the stages of its own lifecycle; from the initial idea, the spark, to its realization (design), its distribution, shelf life, shared product experience and recycling (sustainability). Digital amplifies the characteristics, and helps the identity adapt at each stage.

In-store opportunities
The retail outlet is the most important arena for public choice. It is intense in its range of decisions, and numbing in its range of (similar) products. Inside this arena there are limited opportunities within frameworks. Frameworks put in place by the non-digital, non-organic world of cardboard and floor space. Digital transcends the limitations of the shop infrastructure, serving communication through personal devices controlled by a digital brain in “the cloud”.

In the advertising mindset the retail communication belongs to the “call-to-action” category. But this limits itself both in its expense on resources (financial and labor), scarcity of real estate and limited time span. In the design mindset the goal is rather strength through identity, creating a long lasting top-of-mind preference through establishing an interesting story, sharing values, creating memberships and avoiding the retail rock concerts of advertising.

Business opportunities
There are new business opportunities to be explored and discovered through the extension of digital and organic platforms. From engaging the crowds to taking the store to the world – not limiting access to it by physical destination. In categories where products follow patterns and become remarkably similar, it is digital and organic platforms that not only invite customers to explore and discover new, unique experiences. But also develop more layered identities, establishing thicker product relationships, and unwrap new business opportunities.

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A special thanks to PSFK which as with a stroke of coincidence launched their brilliant PSFK Future of Retail Report just last week, adding a whole section to my presentation – I’ve been extensively referencing the source.

PSFK Future of Retail Report

I would also ad these brilliant people and publications as they all helped in filtering the cases and surfacing the best ones:

springwise.com
popsop.com
mashable.com
rubbishcorp.com
adverblog.com
Ingmar de Lange
mobilemarketer.com
digitalbuzzblog.com
Zeus Jones
storefrontbacktalk.com
cpbgroup.com
techcrunch.com
Seth Godin
Richard Murray (for giving us the best insight on retail)
and for his brilliant and extensive posts, *Supercollider at geoffnorthcott.com.

In the communications hierarchy, there are four main field’s positioned in relation to each other. Could visualization introduce a way of understanding their role and ability in relation to each other?

During a short talk with Ji Lee at Gulltaggen 2010, he presented a hierarchy where advertising is at the top, then marketing, brand and at the bottom design. I’d never thought of placing these four fields into such a structure, but loved the concept, and it made sense to position them in relation to each other in this way.

Trying to design this idea, I ended up drawing a pyramid and started adding context to each stage…

Advertising
At the top of the pyramid, advertising can be at least three things:

1. Positioning (Al Ries, Jack Trout),
2. Creating an anticipation of the experience outside the experience itself.
3. Direct sales

Advertising is a great tool for selling anything from low interest products to aiding in creating or changing the perception of a brand. Advertising is tangible, but swift and constantly changing. Its stories and messages are focused on getting people to perform an action. Advertising is designed from briefs defined by guidelines, strategies and goals further down the pyramid; it’s top level communication.

Marketing
Marketing is the process of promoting and selling goods and services. It’s executed through individual actions, but fundamentally it’s the overall strategic program, defining, coordinating and executing on all levels of the organization. Marketing is the sum of day to day activities putting products to market and activating people through promotion and sales. Marketing is designed to achieve company goals and is constrained/directed by brand and design.

Brand
There are as many definitions of what a brand is as there are brand experts, from Neumeier’s “gut feeling”, to Yakob’s “The collective perception”. One thing is for certain; brand value exists in the mind of people engaging with it – not the company itself. But still, there needs to be guidance and direction to this value. The brand strategy defines how the company should achieve the right set of values. Branding aims at creating an advantage in a market place filled with identical products, as Helen Fischer quotes George Bernard Shaw: “Love is overestimating the difference between one woman and another”. The brand direction defines a framework and guides the rest of the company’s promotional and sales activities, but it is not fundamental, it is not the core company idea.

Design
The fundamental idea behind the company comes from its design. From identifying how to offer value in a specific situation, to designing the product (or service), how it creates value, its unique, identifiable identity, its story, form, interaction etc. From the initial value proposition to its tangible product the design defines how it creates value, how it performs, and how it remarks itself in the marketplace.

Design in this context is not just the visualization of an engineered product; it’s the comprehensive identity of the company or product – from the ground up.

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By looking at the pyramid we can identify the role of each field of communication and how it relates to the other fields. (Advertising is created on the basis of the marketing strategy, which is the consequence of the brand and design platform. The brand is an enforcer of, or supplement to, the design – or lack of design).

It’s also important to note that job title does not define which part of the pyramid you are working on. Great ideas come from great groups of people, not labels. The point is: Understanding the role of the job at hand, and how this job is positioned in the greater complexity of the communications strategy.

If an identity is to create value through identifiable and differentiating qualities, it can’t be designed through employment in the latter stages of a standardized process. It needs to lead the entire creative and strategic process from its initial spark to its finale.

In his talk on FMCG, brands and product design, Richard Murray suggests that we are better at creating categories than individual brands.

Is the sameness of unoriginal ideas to be blamed on our processes being too similar? If the analysis to the insight, to the design and form follows the same pattern across consultancies, agencies and brands, then everybody follows a similar pattern in order to discover the great insight that leads to the unique idea. The problem is, there is a lack of unique ideas. We are in a hammer and nail situation: “If we think our only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail”.

Organic platforms isn’t only evidence of this, it might as well be the biggest category driven collection of surfaces we have.

A great deal of organic productions are built on an offspring of a model created back in 2000. A brilliant tool with an unfortunate side effect: everybody follows an identical pattern for development, one that engineers the structure in a one-dimensional approach, before adding identity at the end; as some kind of tag.

There are originally two legs to identity: The first one is the understanding that the visual identity and story of the product helps it differentiate itself in the market and create a place in peoples harts. The second one is the experience created around the product which helps the product become unique, by enhancing its identity through experience.

On organic platforms there is a third leg as well: Identity design is not only used to design experiences, it also identifies existing experiences.

What does this mean: Designing identities, on organic platforms, has expanded it’s traditional form, which to a large extent has been focused on visual identities and story. Designing identities now also demands that we identifying existing experiences and redesign / augment / ad value to them.

The result of the existing generic standardization, is that it has created an overwhelming range of sameness. Different brands offering the same services, content and applications online – following a pattern that not only creates a surge to make sure we are offering whatever everybody else is offering (the artificial standard / benchmark), but worse – having everything created, copyable by the competition.

Adding a different color scheme or logic at the end of a process does not create a unique experience, it merely ads a label to a generic offering. This is the result of a mindset where identity takes a back seat and is added at the end.

A generic brand identity is not an identity, its a category.

Unique and identifiable brands on organic platforms comes from doing the opposite to the standard process: It starts with the identity, and employs it to every strategic and creative decision from the first spark to the finale. Resulting in a unique and identifiable experience, which the competition is unable to copy and standardize in the marketplace.