The new world of marketing is on the wall. The subway wall.
We are being hit by profound changes and five years from now your business will have to have adapted or face extinction. You’re in a fight for the survival of the fittest.
I don’t have to tell you how rapidly business, media and leisure are changing. It’s as if every day we discover something new we didn’t know existed, and have to change our behaviour.
From booking tickets for the movies to buying a book, from visiting the bank to checking the encyclopaedia, from filling a government form to applying for a job. We do things differently now, and the changes will come faster.
The accelerator will be the National Broadband Network.
Now that it is getting over its stuttering start, we will see it spread like oil on a pond. Already the navvies with their orange jackets and blue cables are appearing on corners in every state.
Let me give you an example of what could happen.
Two months ago in Seoul, South Korea, commuters discovered that the walls of one of the busiest subway stations had been covered with illuminated pictures of shopping shelves. Row after row of cereal boxes and detergents and soup packets, just like in a real supermarket.
Above the displays were the instructions. Use the application on your smart phone (if you haven’t got it, call this number and it will be instantly inserted). With the phone’s camera, take a photo of the QR code on whatever product you want.
Oh that’s a Quick Response code. The funny square dots that keep appearing on products and newspapers and look like a bar code on steroids. Which is precisely what they are.
They link your smartphone into the web and exchange information. One snap and you have just bought that item.
Walk the length of the wall and its pillars with shopping list in one hand and phone in the other, clicking off the week’s groceries. By the time the train gets you home, the order is already with the supermarket, being picked and packed for delivery.
The Koreans have the world’s fastest and biggest national broadband network, are the biggest consumers of smartphones, the highest users of QR codes. So they are leading the world in this new technology. Have no doubt about it, we will be following the same road.
Just this week our sister newspaper The Australian questioned 15 of the country’s leading advertising buyers about the opportunities that will come from the NBN. All agreed that they will be considerable.
They counted off internet television and movies, online e-commerce like Korea’s, better information delivery and feedback, greater connectivity with country areas.
“There’s a million opportunities,” said Aegis Media chairman Harold Mitchell.
“Speed will accelerate changes in retail behaviour...and open the door for new models,” says Mindshare Australia’s James Greet.
“Any brands enabled...to build deeper relationships through content and genuine dialogue will win,” adds OMD’s Peter Horgan.
And MEC’s Peter Fogel concluded: “The brands that will win are those able to attract and engage consumers more often and for longer periods of time”.
In other words, your relationship with your customers will be closer, faster, more intimate. You will know them better - but in turn they will know you better.
This is an opportunity to develop a real dialogue with your customers, like speaking to each of them face to face in your office or shop. The combination of fast broadband and smartphones gives you that interaction any time, any place.
What a brave new world we are stepping into. How ready are you to cope with it?
ray@ebeatty.com
