The ’00s baby

Let’s start with an example. Rewind back a decade and we have the 1st iPhone entering the market dominated by Nokia (snake!) and BBM chats. The Geeks pounce. Next the Mainstreamers surf on the crest of the hype wave and buy into the movement. Subsequently the Late Adopters purchase the device convinced by media and word of mouth, and most likely the death of their device. Finally we have our parents!

This is a typical adoption journey of new products, chiefly technologies. Further into the future and we are becoming more receptive to change and progress, especially as information and opinions on products become readily available. The brands  now call themselves transparent – the buzz word that’s been thrown around recently, and we see the distribution of consumers lean towards the earlier adopters.

Now, if you are a brand in 20-almost-16 you have a new cohort of audiences that is Generation Z, who are entering the workforce and we would hope a higher disposable income. Brands, rejoice! However their consumption of products and brand content is somewhat distinct. “A good product will sell itself” belief era has been left in the shadows and the goods in the homogenous and over-saturated markets are in need of drastic distinction, which mainly falls back on who makes the most noise, but the right type of noise.

So what do the Gen Z-ers consider to be cool brands:

1. The Enablers. They grew up with smartphones and tablets in their cribs. Technology to Gen Z-er’s is not a luxury or a pastime, it became an extension of self, hence their social media profiles are likely to actually resemble them and not the aspirational characters that we are trying to create for ourselves (yes, I do Crossfit, honest!). The platforms such as Youtube, Instagram, WordPress, the devices such as the iPhone, all help us to manifest our creative selves. They democratise disciplines such as cinematography, photography and publishing to name a few, which means these areas are now easily accessible by many with a comparatively small initial endowment than before. The public is finally embracing creativity as part of every individual’s skill set as opposed to a predisposition of the few, thus these enablers are playing an ever bigger part in our lives.
2. Personalities. How many toilet paper brands do we have? Is their product offering substantially different from one another: soft, multi-layer yada yada? Yet Charmin (bear!) has 68k Twitter followers – not bad for something you wipe your tush with. Brands are now expected to have a personality and the successful players pick and maintain the right ones. If a talking toilet roll or a bottle of deodorant doesn’t work for you, then a mascot with a quirk might; think back to Old Spice. Noting that we are plugged into the wider web 24/7 and expect continuous digital stimulus, the brands have their work cut out for them to maintain a continuous conversation with their fickle consumers. The bottom line is you are not buying just a product, you are buying into a relationship.

The ’00s babies might adopt new offerings more readily, but if you disappoint them they will switch in a heartbeat. The path to self-actualisation now lies through brands that have integrated themselves into our lives as springboard platforms. If you cannot reach the peaks of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs via toilet paper or deodorant then the least these brands can do is provide some entertainment on the way.

Hollywood and Its Rivals

When people used to say that Hollywood was in trouble they tended to refer to piracy. Now the new breed of trouble is the completely legal and immensely popular online video entertainment channels such as YouTube, Hulu and Netflix. Should the studios battle the new digitally armed opponent or embrace the change?

The movie star glow is dissipating, as less people choose to watch a film just because of it’s lead actor/actress. My cat, your hamster – now anyone can become a YouTube celebrity. The public is more interested in content (the above was probably a lousy example, but you see my point). In a conversation with Mark Dinning, the editor-in-chief of Empire magazine (UK), he alluded to this point by saying that if in the past the sequels to the superhero films maintained a regurgitated plot, today each one has its own identity with an evolving character dynamic. Take Iron Man and his flying suit; in the 1st film he jets around the sky like a turbocharged bee whereas by the the 3rd there is hardly any flying and a deeper exploration of character interaction.

The more obvious reason for falling studio revenues is that people are increasingly choosing to plug-into sites like YouTube and Netflix, rather than venture out to the cinema or buy a DVD. Are movie theatres becoming a thing of the past? What is more likely is that people are hungrier for a richer experience, which simple blockbuster viewing does not satisfy. Film packages provided by Secret Cinema allow the viewer to become immersed in the plot by being transported in a prison bus from Shawshank Redemption to the secret film site; and theatres like The Electric or Everyman house sofas and offer gourmet tapas for a more premium experience pricing the tickets accordingly.

The experience-led trend also translates to the film genres with high budget, special effect inundated movies topping the box office sales. I wouldn’t abandon my comfortable sofa and trek in the heat to a stuffy cinema for a rom com, but I would for Iron Man 3, simply because of the scale of the action on a big screen. Studios, aware of this behaviour and not willing to gamble are likely to go with films that are less likely to make a loss. Spielberg commented

‘A studio would rather invest $250m in one film for a real shot at the brass ring than make a whole bunch of really interesting, deeply personal – and even maybe historical – projects’

Who could argue? The fact of the matter is that even if we have been lured into the lazy webs of online content viewing, studios and cinemas are not going anywhere, just adapting to our new lifestyle.

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Digital Age

Image source: Digital Flow by Enkhtuvshin’s 5DmkII

In the last few decades technology advanced, facilitated and disrupted our lives. Fossil fuel extraction became more efficient, an iPhone is of equal performance of a $5m supercomputer from 1975, and more people around the world have an access to a connected mobile network than to basic amenities. The latter example might be a bitter-sweet challenge yet to be addressed.

All of the above not mentioning genomics, robotics and more, brought basic cost-efficiency to the market, changed industrial landscapes with employers seeking more tech savvy workers and made the the public hungry for increased transparency.

The ongoing battle of security versus transparency started leaning towards the latter, where sophisticated equipment is developed to protect us from the natural disasters, accidents and other sophisticated tools in the hands of criminals. When looking to social media for answers not many things beat it as a real-time information platform. Japan’s scientists developed a prototype of tweet-based software dubbed “Torreter” to be used as an advanced earthquake-warning system that is said to be quicker than any of the existing ones. Let’s not forget the Boston Bombings where the social tools such as YouTube’s Spotlight gathered videos submitted by the public used to identify the culprits.

The news organisations now employ data miners, who instead of digging through files in the archives search through the sea of information across social networks. Deputy editor of The Telegraph, Benedict Brogan, mentions that in this digital age, once the event has been announced flocs of reporters don’t grab their cell phones and rush to the scene – they jump onto their laptops and try to get hold of snippets of information via Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The Telegraph was the first paper to identify a woman who confronted the criminals in the Woolwich attack by churning through social media. The Guardian has Guardian Witness, a place where users can submit their content to be later used by the paper. The transmission of data has become so fast that the first outcry to the world during the episode in Boston happened via Twitter at the same time as the first explosion. “Holy shit! Explosion!” Kirsten Surman tweeted at 7:50pm on the 15th of April.

Being connected is one of the aspects of our digital life people value the most. There is already a long debate of the importance of physical interaction in the work space vs remoting in from home, just look towards Yahoo. The latter argument tends to give the adults, that we are, more flexibility in their day-to-day routine loosely influenced by an organisation, whereas the former is all about sparking off innovation in the office as you bump into like-minded people. The highlight for this particular piece, serendipity aside, is the ease of which you can break geographical barriers and, for instance Skype into a meeting room in Hong Kong to show off a prototype, without wasting resources on multiple commutes. In the next few years, as Google Glasses and other wearable technology assimilate into our lifestyle, meetings “on-the-go” would be a usual occurrence.

From Arab Spring to Wenzhou high-speed train disaster to Taksim Square protests the internet facilitates communication between the authorities and the public expressing their concern in an attempt to democratise regimes. This acquired ease of assembling a mass of opinions to provoke action has another side where the original agenda can become blurred. As more people “plug into” the issue, numerous causes get bundled into a tangled ball rarely producing a desired outcome but more often a violent surge of protests. The Brazilian discontent over the increases in bus fares soon became a wide-cause demonstration as the intoxicating sense of possibilities spread fast across the web. “Occupy…” anything, started as an anti-consumerist sit-in resulting in the street folk and the bored students using the space as a camp site dissipating as quickly as it sprung up. The web might facilitate thought-union assembly but the lack of digital organisation doesn’t help the promoted issue stay on track.

When it comes to sought-after financial information no one knows its value better than Bloomberg – the financial data juggernaut. Ever since the company’s founder and now mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, departed from Salomon Brothers in 1981, his goal was to make the financial market a more transparent playing field by creating a product, Bloomberg Terminal, that provides real-time valuable financial data to its clients.  The public now spoilt by effortless accessibility of timely data pressures the companies to take the next step. Only a few of weeks ago Qatar Exchange urged all of its listed companies to update their periodical corporate data (in addition to quarterly and annual reports) through social media to be in line with investors’ needs. Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, on the other hand faced SEC scrutiny over the June viewership number announcement made on the company’s Facebook page in summer 2012. Hastings is now taking a lead role in communicating corporate information through social media soon after SEC’s revision of rules regarding social networks.

Transistor by transistor we are building a path to a more connected, efficient and democratic world. It comes with obstacles and occasional “Angry Birds” distractions. The more sophisticated the technology gets the more challenging the problems become; at the same time we have better tools and understanding to deal with them. This is not the discovery of penicillin nor electricity but our ongoing digital progress is leading to something no less substantial which takes time. Even chance favours a prepared mind.

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