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.

The iPad might be an impressive piece of technical hardware, but it’s just a box. Innovating for boxes, instead of people, will just help us create more tools, not change behaviors. There is a lack of interest in figuring out the human component, and an over exaggerated focus on platforms.

After reading this PSFK article on how the social mechanics of Chatroulette inspired Daniel Vydra to rebuild an application to serve random news articles from the New York Times, and then this comment by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing (Shared by @mikearauz). It seems obvious that the innovation we are searching for is found through the understanding of human behavior; how to make them better, improve or create additions to them.

But, then seeing how the brilliant ideas behind this breathtaking prototype, being re-purposed for the iPad, end up with nothing more than an obvious HTML 2.0 concept here, it seems that the ambitions are more connected with having a presence on a box than actually bettering behaviors.

It’s frustrating to acknowledge that even though innovation and brilliant ideas come from understanding people and situations, we are overly focused on boxes, engineering, developers and electrical circuits.

As Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing writes in his comment on the iPad:

“The real issue isn’t the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.”

When an industry scrambles to put their stuff on the iPad, they are not making better products for more interesting situations, they are misunderstanding the concept of content, conversation and contagion. They are building stuff for a bigger, different box.

The changes the iPad and tablets alike could bring to people is massive, but then we need to explore the human potential, not the box.

Doctorow’s example on Marvel’s iPad application is more descriptive than anything:

“I mean, look at that Marvel app (just look at it). I was a comic-book kid, and I’m a comic-book grownup, and the thing that made comics for me was sharing them. If there was ever a medium that relied on kids swapping their purchases around to build an audience, it was comics. And the used market for comics! It was — and is — huge, and vital. I can’t even count how many times I’ve gone spelunking in the used comic-bins at a great and musty store to find back issues that I’d missed, or sample new titles on the cheap.
…
So what does Marvel do to “enhance” its comics? They take away the right to give, sell or loan your comics. What an improvement. Way to take the joyous, marvellous sharing and bonding experience of comic reading and turn it into a passive, lonely undertaking that isolates, rather than unites. Nice one, Misney.”

The iPad is not the problem here, it’s a symptom defining a larger problem; the fact that we still haven’t figured out that if we are to build better and smarter solutions for our citizens, members, partners, participants, readers or even customers, then the piece of hardware we need to be looking at is the human brain – and the infrastructure surrounding it – not a piece of unwrapped plastic.

If our future friends are out objects, how would we communicate with them?

In his lecture from SXSW Douglas Rushkoff discusses how the population at large is always one step behind the evolution of mediums:

“We got text, we got a 22 letter alphabet, and what kind of society resulted from that? A bunch of Israelites who go to the town square and hear the rabbi read the Torah to them. So we get the technology to read, and what ability do we get? The ability of the generation before. We get the printing press, does everyone become a writer? No, we get a civilization of readers and an elite of writers. Now we get the computer, do we get a nation of programmers? No, we get a nation of bloggers … My issue is that at each stage, when we get a new medium, civilization seems to be one step behind.” – Douglas Rushkoff

Now Rushkoff suggest that in order to keep up with this pattern in evolution, our next step is to learn to program. But what/why will we need to program in this “next iteration”?

(video via Boing Boing)

Trying to figure this one out, I have grasped a part of the ideas that Rushkoff presents and found from my archives the article I’ve written for the Age of Conversation 3 – soon to be released, where I suggest that in the future our friends are our objects. (Heavily inspired by the minds of Matt Jones, Kevin Slavin, Timo Arnall and Rafi Haladjian).

Rushkoff’s point, as I understand it, is that we in a world where we are able to talk and communicate with our surrounding environment – saturated with objects, need to be able to program our environments so as not to let anyone else program them for us – and by that relinquishing our identity – programming would not only be useful, but a given.

As a teaser I’ve added a snippet from my article to Age of conversation below:

“A conversation is more than just the exchange of vocabulary language between two or more people. Rather a conversation is a rich exchange of ideas through several languages expressed synchronously and consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously between identities.

What we define as the social web today is not the future of the conversation. The future of the conversation is everywhere, as digital is everywhere and marketing is everywhere. And our future friends are identities, which might as well be people as objects. “

This post is the first of three arguments presenting a perspective on what will be important and interesting in regards to identity and design the coming two to three years: Which is how identity and design transforms as the artificial barriers of technology disappears and people change their behaviors.

And how this affects the natural, constant and unstoppable evolution of what it takes to remain valuable as a company.

—

Part one: Organic

“Digital” as a term is obsolete and unhelpful, because it invites us into a mindset where the technology defines the purpose of the product.

Technology historically, in regards to design, is a consequence of our conceptual process, not the purpose of it.

“Digital” is just a reference to a form of technology on which the surface is supported, equal to paper, plastic or metal.

“Digital” does not reference any specific use or motivation, such as; business card, packaging or book would in regards to paper technology. It only references some abilities in regards to its structural compound.

Why is it then that “digital” as a term – no matter how misleading it is, no matter how little insight and understanding it invites us to take with us into a process, stands as this beacon on top of a desperate range of stuff?

In the words of Steve Taylor and Christian Ruland from their brilliant new book “The Case Against Ideas”:

Take ‘digital’ for instance: an amorphous catch-all term that fails to distinguish between dozens of distinct new forms of communication, each requiring a distinct approach.”

Where on the one side, defining stuff as digital is as unhelpful as defining design for other surfaces as “paper” or “rubber”, we are by over using the term “digital” removing or failing to see the motivation behind the design – which is the essential insight.

When all this is said; stuff designed on surfaces supported by digital technology have some abilities which are not unique for this technology, but descriptive of a lot of the stuff that is there:

Organic – the surface itself responds to environmental influence. This can be interaction, updates, monitor size etc. But the process has to include the idea that an important product ability is to adapt and/or morph – while still preserving the designed identity.

Activities – digital technology opens the door much wider in regards to how design can help build better products and services. How identity, visual language and designed activities can make companies and their efforts more valuable, appreciated and sought after through adding valuable services around their existing products or activities.

The goal is to start looking for a more useful terminology, to identify motivation, not generic labels, and to see how new technology opens up new opportunities – while not ignoring, but enhancing existing crafts.

An example from Berg, Bonnier and Mag+:

A presentation on the future opportunities in media, turning threats into insights into opportunities.

The presentation future media – no more middle men, is an accumulation of a range of relevant thoughts from this blog, put into system.

It’s built as a master slide set (to pick and sort from), but I tried to ad some structure to it by identifying six major “forces” affecting media, and then a short final chapter summarizing a suggested future mindset.

I’ve also chosen to ad a lot of the explanatory text – not just the headlines – into the slides this time, hopefully this will create more context for the people reading the thing online.

Find individual slides available for download under a CC license on my flickr.com account everything new is dangerous.

Find the presentation below, or on my slideshare account slideshare.net/helgetenno.

A new presentation on the role of marketing in the post digital landscape, with a special focus on developing the product relationship into a membership based marketing business model.

Presented Tuesday for the SAS Institute in Norway.

As I find my slide style being remixed (and loving the fact that it is :) on slideshare.net, I am currently trying to redevelop some stuff. I’ve added a lot of text from this blog to the slides, and hope this will provide more context for the readers and participants.

If interested you can, as always, find most of the individual slides on my flickr.com account everythingnewisdangerous.

As always, I’d love to hear what you think, especially your favorite slides – and why.

The presentation is embedded below, or find it on slideshare.net.

Products have always been important in peoples lives. Most of the stuff we own and talk about is stuff we have purchased. There is a deep and profound relationship between people and a lot of their stuff.

Unfortunately it’s easy to get the impression that this relationship hasn’t been the focus of marketing, which has spent most of its energy on positioning, availability and sales promotion. To some extent one can suggest that marketing has ignored the existing relationship between people and their products, and instead built it’s own marketing relationship, different from the product’s and built on a different set of values.

This has led marketing and products apart, and often created a cleft between them. This cleft has been further forced by the traditional media mindset where it has been impossible for companies to connect with their audience and participants, where media has become an obstacle, a superfluous middle man, where the marketing and the advertising has become messages – not exchanges.

(And one might also suggest that where the product relationship is based on personal and individual narratives, the marketing relationship is based on a generic and artificial narrative)

There are two negatives here, the first one is that marketing is set on creating its own relationship – ignoring the really valuable one already in place between people and products. The other is the traditional communications landscape, which is increasing this distance between the marketing relationship and the product relationship.

Luckily the shift that has been going on for the last four years aims at correcting this. Where marketing changes from focusing on its own agenda to enforcing the values set by the product. Where we are seeing focus moving away from messages and to exchanges and relationships. Which brings marketing and products back together again. Creating a better environment for products, people, companies and the relationship between them.

If marketing is to become a more integrated part of the product experience/context, baked in and/or eventually become more important than the product:

“Marketing becomes the value people want to connect with, the product is merely an invitation into this relationship”. – link

Then it means a different set of demands needs to be put on marketing.

Digital services can’t be measured by downloads, clicks, uses or other advertising-type measures. Marketing integrated with the product needs to be measured by its ability to create value in and business from the relationship with the participant. Marketing needs to be measured by its own business model.

When the marketing becomes the value provider in the company/participant relationship, it needs to define its idea, value proposition, revenue stream and how this is going to measured. Not merely how much attention and use it has generated from being available.

In short, marketing initiatives need more business model thinking integrated into their design process. (And of course this is not exclusive – forcing the BM-ideas to collaborate or grow from narrative ideas creates an environment set to earn from the combination of both worlds).

We might be cautious of forcing new behavior on our participants, because of a reasonable fear that it will be difficult for people to adapt. So we try to find and design solutions inside people’s existing behavioral pattern. But this limits our ability to create better value in our relationships with our participants.

Behavioral psychologist Donald Norman says people adapt to technology; we have always made things that people had to learn – like a doorknob – which attributes new behaviors in their lives. It may have made their lives more practical or better – but they had to learn it.

In the context of company/customer relationships and through the lens of services, Tim Brown, of IDEO, ads to this train of thought:

“Any Service organization has got to get over the idea that a great service is something where the consumer doesn’t have to do anything. That’s a really bad service. A great service is where the consumer actually participates, and where they get drawn in, and where they become part of it.”

People following this blog might have already seen some of my frustration with today’s standards for graphical user interfaces, which I find are almost exclusively based on anything else than the human aspect:

It seems we are at the end of a period where interactive design was mere decoration. Where algorithmic logic and robotic rationality shaped the reasoning behind the interfaces trying to engage people in services, content and marketing. – http://www.180360720.no/index.php/archive/post-digital-design/

As the quote suggests we might be at the end of this era, forced through by a greater understanding for the human aspect as technology is immersing into our everyday life. And as a consequence of new platforms inviting us to interact without mechanical augmentations, such as the mouse and keyboard.

But this should not apply to only stuff happening on a two-dimensional screen, where the ability to involve and engage are limited, we should start thinking how to take our services outside the screen, and into the physical environment.

If one looks at a video game console like Wii, or even the physical augmentation of games like Buzz or Guitar Hero, we can ask ourselves, why aren’t banks, retailers or FMCG doing this? What is the barrier to thinking about physical objects when thinking of digital services?

There are already a range of brilliant and inspiring examples:
(Some of these are just concepts or prototypes)

The Copenhagen Wheel

Phillips – Direct Life

Charmr

The BP Photobooth

Sniff

Delivering immediate effect might not be the best business model for designing long-term valuable marketing initiatives.

Advertising is known for getting peoples attention and affecting people’s anticipation of an experience or product. Advertising is media related, the effect is purchasable through unlimited scope.

Advertising is direct, unwanted, often irritating and too often exhaustingly repetitive. It’s short compact stories or direct messages, highlighting exaggerations and often packaged in a clichéd pun. It’s responsive, and provides hot bursts of immediate effect, which cools down quickly.

Brilliant storytellers used to change millions of minds for decades, today they gather millions of views on youtube.

In my mind, advertising is faced with a challenge; it’s own business model, label or sales pitch: We move people and products – fast.

There is a need for long term marketing initiatives; digital concepts and ideas need to carry the longevity of product relationships. Which also implies a different way of measuring value. (What are the metrics identifying the value of a relationship? Are they the same as used for our ability to traffic people back and forth from, and around in, cyberspace?)

The question is, if the advertising industry is in a place clients come with the preconception to create long term marketing initiatives, or if one needs to alter the idea of what the advertising industry does if we are to acquire and lead these projects.

As a friend of mine, David Reid, told me yesterday, referencing a quote by Martin Sorrell: “We are not in the advertising business, we are in the marketing communications business”.

I would say Zeus Jones and Berg London certainly aren’t advertising agencies, but they are doing some of the most interesting stuff out there in this regards. On the other hand you’ve got Razorfish, CP+B and AKQA proving me wrong.

Any ideas?