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You can offer a real experience, one that gives you goosebumps, with really simple means. A concert on a hilltop at dawn, for fifty people who have trekked through the woods all night just for one guy with a guitar. That’s wow.
If our whole world is confined to a screen, whether it’s mobile or a home cinema, the challenge will be to move your audience, to cause a glitch in their otherwise flat digital world. Experience is key, especially post-lockdown. But how to go about this? How to reach people, touch people the right way? What technologies, existing or not (yet) will we use to not only get the message across, but keep people interested?
As Is
Do you know that cartoon that says ‘Who was the driver of digitalisation? Was it the CTO? The CIO? No, it was COVID.’ Lacking live options, brands switched to the online realm in novel ways, and they did it at break-neck speed. Now, it’s about finding balance between the old and the new. Everyone is greedy to start up physical experiences again, but online possibilities are, well, really cool. So let’s get phygital.
Our Technical Advisors do demo’s all over the world, talking to our customers in their own bakery, to understand their issues and mull over ideas. These touchpoints are golden and a drive for innovation.
Clearly, it’s all about the blend. Amazon Prime’s US campaign was a museum on Fifth Avenue, NYC, that lived on in cyberspace. Smart: visitors took tons of pictures and tagged Amazon a thousand times over when sharing their museum excursion online. Same for Smile Safari, a giant Instagram and TikTok playground that’s basically made for taking selfies in. The lesson: online isn’t here to replace our offline lives, it’s here to supplement it with brand new ways to activate our senses.
could be
Beyond the medium though, it will be about building relationships. In B2B, that means sharing the knowledge so your customers can, in turn, offer their clients something that knocks them off their socks. Forget keychains, the future is made of experiences. A workshop to showcase your product? Sure. A T-shirt that says ‘I love your brand’? Not so much. Make it live, and make it about co-creating a result. So the workshop isn’t just your brand talking, but your brand and its audience creating something, together. It’s about co-creation and closeness. The same is true for B2C.
‘I predict an explosion in AR and VR in entertainment.
And while ‘live’ can’t be beaten, the online competition is growing strong. Live streaming concerts in games isn’t new anymore. The entertainment business is pioneering the scene and chances are big stars will experiment even more in the very near future. Look, it's Dua Lipa in your living room! However, democratising these expensive technologies will happen somewhere else. With small brands, maybe, who have a sense for detail and will find ways to translate that in experience in online interactions. In the end, you don’t need to bring out the big guns, or spend big budgets to create a lasting experience. What you need is something fresh, and shareable.