Our passive drift towards a world where sensors, monitors and machine learning pose a real challenge to innovating companies.

Trust is a testimonial

The signals from our research on future trends tell us that commerce for new brands is going to get tougher. While shopping for consumer products is easier in many ways than it was a few years ago, it’s still a complex operation. We can all research online, visit stores and compare prices across media to get the best deal. You may resist a visit to the shops if you’re buying clothes, but Apple says that 80% of people who buy online have been into store first.

We read seller recommendations and take notice of peer testimonials. This might be the single thing that influences our final buying decision. Without buyer endorsements, we have learnt not to trust brand promises and to be wary of positioning statements that promise too much.

Trust is what everyone else does

So, we don’t trust things until someone else validates our decision. As James Clear says in his book, Atomic Habits, “we’d rather be wrong with others than right by ourselves” and this describes the problem facing innovators today.

Unless shoppers make independent judgements, we will all end up making the same decision and the biggest promoter will win out.

The industry that has evolved around these issues makes our lives harder still. We’ve all received advertising from brands who don’t mind where their address list came from. Scraped data is big business. Similarly, our passive drift towards a world where sensors, monitors, facial recognition, sat nav and machine learning push us into actions, is a real issue for innovating companies.

Trust in technology

Wearable technology is a relatively easy thing to spot. Phones, watches and tablets are part of the fabric of everyday life. As we use them, our behaviours are captured by some of the biggest data harvesters the world has ever seen: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple to name only the big few. These data-centric platforms have one objective: to advertise to you. Every feed you access is sending you adverts that respond to your search activity. You are being inexorably nudged towards a buying decision. You are sensing little acts of influence every minute of every day that you spend on a device.

Trust is a nudge in the right direction

If you are a brand and aren’t nudging your customer towards you, you are being nudged out of the market. If you’re a new brand, you have choices: stay local and grow organically, trade local and get ‘found’, or secure investment and dilute. It’s a tough one.

But all is not lost. Consumer inbuilt scepticism allows for some push-back. Why is your most frequently seen advert in your feed? Where does that email come from that reminds you it’s your friend’s birthday? Who knows that your car lease is due for renewal?

Our filters for advertising are as highly tuned today as they were when all we had to worry about were leaflets through the door and posters on the bus. But the volume of media we consume (estimated at @300,000 words per day, the same length as an average novel) makes it hard to resist buying something just to satisfy the pressure.

So, how do new brands break into a market?

There are many answers but the truth is, it’s going to take time. Tenacity, energy, creativity and bloody-mindedness will help. There are a lucky few who may gallop through this cycle and X Factor-esque quick wins may happen. Pragmatically, though, the best advice might come from the most unexpected philosopher of our time, Jack Reacher: “Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

Target trust

Play the long game and build customer trust over awareness. Target trust over availability. In fact, target trust as your marketing collateral. It’s where ‘organic’ growth comes from and it doesn’t rely on digital endorsement, peer approval or huge media spend.

Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.

Perspective affects everything we do, including how we allow insight to influence our view of consumer need.

A LinkedIn contact recently posted a blog about the tendency of millennials not to buy material goods (houses, cars) in the same way older generations have been trained to do. The data that support this are strong and the trend shows that Gen Y is even less inclined to follow the path of their elders, preferring to invest in experience over roots.

The thread included empirical evidence from people who have sold property in order to live an experience based lifestyle. Despite this the thread included a comment from a Management Consultant suggesting the trend is down to the affordability of houses in the UK.

On closer inspection the demographic of the contributors justifies some review of the first assumption. Are they millennials or at a time of life when the choice is easier to make? In this case it was an equal split so the data need some more division.

But, so what? If the trend is clear, is the cause important?

If you’re a mortgage lender this insight has a different impact than if you’re a travel broker. Either way interpretation is going to influence your view of the macro trend and your response.

In itself is this innovation? No. But an opportunity for innovation? Absolutely, in both cases. Trend analysis that adopts an objective stance rather than one looking for validation of an idea is something that may not be possible without taking in some external help. 

The market research industry has made capital from this kind of situation for aeons. Because the same data can be differently regarded their market is wide but it’s time to challenge what MR delivers and what can be differently interpreted from data. This is why bespoke insight gathered from new sources and the re-purposing of old data with new tools has become highly demanded. We’re all looking for the money shot.

Today, machine learning allows us to access and handle data in such quantity that views of the future can be yours alone. Say what you will about technology, for a time this new facility has the potential to drive Innovation strategy into business with real and unique product and service differentiation; Design Thinking differently informed; that’s a powerful combination.

But who to take advice from is another conundrum. This isn’t for us to say so let’s leave it to Seth Godin; “…if we pre-process our reactions to things already labelled we don’t have to reconsider our plan.” Future thinking. Future Proofing. It’s what we do.

The predictions are that smartphones will be old technology within a few years. Commentators are sceptical. Try telling anyone you talk to and see what they say.

And yet there are developments that may just be tolling the death knell for our favourite device:

Bone conduction implants have been around for a while and used in medical settings but the technology is now creeping into the consumer space after a few false starts. One of the more recent “Zungle’s Panther Bone Conduction speaker transmits sound waves to the skull via vibrations.” https://www.zungleinc.com

Spectacles by Snap www.spectacles.com send video straight to your online account. They see what you see. GoogleGlass anyone?

Project Jacquard may be the glue that sticks the emerging tech together. Already available as a Levi jacket: “Project Jacquard makes it possible to weave touch and gesture interactivity into any textile using standard, industrial looms. Everyday objects such as clothes and furniture can be transformed into interactive surfaces.” https://atap.google.com/jacquard/

With haptic and audio prompts part of the consumer landscape, gesture control and voice control appearing more and more and connected screens increasingly integrated into everyday lives, our need to carry screens is decreasing.

“Heisenberg looks around a bar and says, ‘Because there are three of us and because this is a bar, it must be a joke. But, is it funny?’

And Gödel thinks for a moment and says, ‘Well, because we’re inside the joke, we can’t tell whether it is funny. We’d have to be outside looking at it.’

And Chomsky looks at them and says, ‘Of course it’s funny. You’re just telling it wrong.’”

Perspective, it affects everything we do, including how we allow insight to influence our view of consumer need.

We saw something today that brought this home. A LinkedIn contact posted a blog about the tendency of millennials not to buy material (houses, cars) goods in the same way older generations have been trained to do. The data that support this is strong and the trend shows that Gen Y is even less inclined to follow the path of their elders, preferring to invest in experience over roots.

The thread included empirical evidence from people who have sold property in order to live an experience based lifestyle. Despite this the thread included a comment from a Management Consultant claiming the trend is down to the affordability of houses in the UK.

On closer inspection the demographic of the contributors justifies some review of the first assumption. Are they millennials or at a time of life when the choice is easier to make? In this case it was an equal split so the data needs some more division.

But, so what? If the trend is clear, is the cause important? If you’re a mortgage lender this insight has a different impact than if you’re a travel broker. Either way interpretation is going to influence your view of the macro trend and your response.

Innovation? No. An opportunity for innovation? Absolutely, in both cases.

The market research industry has made capital from this kind of situation for aeons. Because the same data can be differently regarded their market is wide. This is why bespoke insight gathered from new sources and the re-purposing of old data with new tools has become of high value.

Only recently, machine learning allows us to access and handle data in such quantity that views of the future can be your alone. Say what you will about technology, for a time this new facility has the potential to drive Innovation strategy into business with real and unique product and service differentiation. Design thinking differently informed; that’s a powerful combination.

But who to take advice from is another conundrum. This isn’t for us to say so let’s leave it to Seth Godin whose Heisenberg passage it is that we borrowed above: “…if we pre-process our reactions to things already labelled we don’t have to reconsider our plan.”

Future thinking: it’s what we do at room44.

Drop us a line at helpme@room44.co.uk and let’s see how we can help each other.

www.room44.co.uk Innovation justified.

A portal on a world of change just opened with Project Jacquard.

And so it begins. A week ago, we wrote of a few innovation drivers that are coming down the road at us at increasing speed. Among them is the prediction that smartphones will be superseded by 2024.

This isn’t our prediction (http://kk.org) but, at the time of writing, there weren’t many overt indications that ‘innovation’ had seen the signals. Sure, wearable technology has seen an upswing in the use of step counters and heart rate monitors and also a downturn after an initial rush of enthusiasm amongst end users, but lasting and cohesive connectivity still sits in the realms of the Beta / VHS wars of the 80s.

So when Google and Levi announced its Project Jacquard is launching a new, enabled jacket at SXSW this week (13th March 2017) we had an eye-sparkle moment.

We’d just reported a seven-year endpoint to a trend that hadn’t really got going and now it most definitely has.

Project Jacquard is presented as an open canvas concept. Here is utilises gesture control and a freedom from carrying around your smartphone brick just as the starting point.

Extrapolate the opportunities to stem from this single but complex development and all manner of viable possibilities appear.

Is this the end of the smartphone? Should we expect to see Chinese phone factories losing volume and Corning without a ready market for Gorilla Glass? Maybe Yorkshire mill towns can expect a revival? Who knows, but all manner of futurists and analysts will get their teeth into this sooner or later.

Where we used to rely on Apple for groundbreaking tech advances, Google now leads the way – today at least.

From the Project Jacquard website:

Connected clothes offer new possibilities for interacting with services, devices, and environments. These interactions can be reconfigured at any time.

Jacquard is a blank canvas for the fashion industry. Designers can use it as they would any fabric, adding new layers of functionality to their designs, without having to learn about electronics. 

Developers will be able to connect existing apps and services to Jacquard-enabled clothes and create new features specifically for the platform.

We are also developing custom connectors, electronic components, communication protocols, and an ecosystem of simple applications and cloud services.

OK, so Google has tried something like this before with Google Glass, but this is different. This trend now signals a truly new vision of the future for everybody, not least of all for App, and all, developers.

No phones? What does an App now need to look like to meet the need of a new consumer? Where’s the screen? Snap Spectacles is a thing, gesture control is working its way into cars already and so why not clothing.

The signs have been there for ages. We knew it was coming. Now enabled clothing is a thing too, with a platform to grow on.

Gen Z will get it straight away. For a new concept so radical the idea has immediate appeal and not just for digital natives. Baby Boomers with the cash to blow on a $350 jacket will want it – now.

Jacket talks to GoogleGlass? Entirely probable. To Alexa? Simple. To Garmin Connect, Moves Count, MyFitnessPal, Evernote? No problem.

It may still take seven years to kill the phone but it’s really feasible that it will happen – sooner than we thought.

Watch this space. A portal on a world of change just opened.

Future thinking; it’s what we do at room44.

Drop us a line at helpme@room44.co.uk and let’s see how we can help each other.

www.room44.co.uk Innovation justified.