In the first part of this series of post about the immediate future of digital marketing, I’ll discuss consumer behavior. 

Early in my career, I was on a team that focused on emerging digital markets. We prioritized our projects based on projects we’d make about where CE (Consumer Electronics) products would go in the future. I had a debate with my supervisor about TV remote controls and how they would evolve over time. I was confident that phone and tablet apps would replace the extra control that in my opinion was just cluttering the coffee table. My supervisor disagreed.

I was wrong with my assertion. My conclusion was based on a single factor – convenience or what I perceived was convenient. I didn’t think about all of the other aspects of a TV remote control. The relatively low cost to produce compared to the higher cost to build and maintain an app. The singular nature of the remote vs the number of users who could download the app and use it to control the larger, shared device. The touch factor of knowing that you’re pushing a button without having to look away. The list things I should have thought about goes on and on.

I think about this debate a lot as my supervisor taught me a lot about projections, consumer technology, leadership, and many other career things. As I gained experience my thinking evolved. I started looking at the big picture trying to think about all of the variables and how they ranked. 

In my last post, I teased the three areas that I believe will drive digital marketing forward in the near future. The first one, consumer behavior is what I’ll focus on in this post.

I work with a lot of organizations who think about consumers the way I thought about the TV remote control. They focus on where their target demo is now. To help them grow, my team and I often take that information a few steps deeper. We look at where they are by asking how they got there and what they’re doing there and where they will go in the future.

The future consumer.

The future consumer will be technologically smarter than today’s consumer. 

Is that a shocking statement? I hope not. Think about it, a larger percentage of tomorrow’s consumers is growing up in today digital world. A world that’s advanced and focuses on them. They adopt digital technologies and services much faster and understand how to use the digital soapbox (the internet) to amplify their voice.

Let’s think about this in terms of search. Voice search is getting a lot of press as it should be. Search is shifting as the way people search for information is evolving. From Siri to Alexa to “Hey Google” the world of voice input has come a long way.

It’s not just voice as an input that’s evolving. As consumers use voice to search on these devices they’re using more conversational search queries. This bleeds over into more traditional text searches. How do we know? Search queries are getting longer. More questions are being searches. Google’s SERP feature is growing. The list can go on and on.  

I like this example because it shows the cyclical nature of CE technology, consumers, and the technology behind the CE products. Product adoption took off as the technology that powers them improved. More people trust the results as they’ve gotten better which means these products became more integrated into daily life. It’s second nature for consumers to interact the same across digital experiences so the ‘more human’ interaction trend grew.  

What’s the future hold?

I’m a technology enthusiast. I love to have debates about Apple’s ability to evolve and integrate new technologies quickly. I love to try new devices and experiences. My eyes lit up when I saw a promotion for the new Devils Backbone AR app in the grocery store last week. Not because I like their beer, but because as more organizations create these experiences more people engage with them and collectively we move forward digitally. 

When my team and I think about digital marketing in the future, especially the near future we look at trends that have emerged in other markets. We evaluate technology and the potential problems it can solve. We explore current problems. The digital world evolves quickly, so it’s important to be nimble and keep one eye on the future/

So what are we excited about?

We’re excited about voice and visual search of course and the evolution this of text search as a result. As consumers look for authenticity, we’re excited about community building and creating authentic content to show consumers who’re behind the brands that they support. We’re encouraged by the conversations between brands and consumers across platforms and the ways that can grow and improve going forward, especially in the era where people want things now. We’re encouraged about the future of society because we see that people want to learn and be a part of a larger voice.  

There’s a lot of things we’re excited about when it comes to the future of consumer behavior. We’re also excited about the evolution of CE and the technology behind it.