Читать книгу Next: A Vision of Our Lives in the Future - Marian Salzman - Страница 7

Imagine you’re sitting at your desk, waiting for an important contract. You check your fax machine, your email, and even for FedEx and courier deliveries. And then you call the person who drew up the contract and he says, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get it. I dropped it in the mail slot yesterday.’ Fifteen years ago, that response wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow. But who has time today to wait for snail mail? We want everything yesterday, and we grow increasingly frustrated by people who waste our time with antiquated means of communication.

Well, that’s actually how today’s consumers feel. Having made new technologies a part of our lives, we want everything faster than ever before. Anything that’s not immediate is s-l-o-w. Same-day delivery. Instant news. Nuked meals. DirecTV. PC banking. Increasingly, we have no patience for products and services we can’t access right NOW. And, of great commercial significance, our satisfaction with brands is more and more defined by immediacy rather than quality of service. In North America, in particular, retailers are discovering that customers aren’t willing to wait till the store reopens at 9 a.m. to buy milk. We want it now – and we’ll get it, whether via a competitor that stays open late or at a twenty-four-hour convenience store. The result is a burgeoning number of twenty-four-hour retail establishments, from bookstores and copy shops to doughnut shops.

More than that, consumers around the world are rejecting the notion that ‘one size fits all’. A popular T-shirt one sees today reads, ‘I ask only that you treat me no differently than you would the Queen.’ The T-shirt may be meant as a joke, but the attitude is pure reality. As new technologies have made it easier for companies to target individuals, consumers have grown accustomed to white-gloved treatment. Time magazine comes with a printout showing how the subscriber’s local representatives voted on critical issues. Levi Strauss lets us order computerized-fit jeans. Parents can buy personalized storybooks, videos and dolls for their children. And customer service centres around the world are scrambling to put a touch of 1:1 marketing in their responses. GTE Telesystems in the US, for example, rates each call coming into its customer service centre with three graphic devices (calendar pages to indicate customer longevity, sticks of dynamite to indicate past service problems and money bags to indicate volume). The system allows personnel to respond more appropriately to each caller’s problem.

As consumers, we’re being led to expect products that meet our specific needs. (Why should I sit through world forecasts on the Weather Channel when I can have my particular city’s weather report emailed to me each morning?) We want to access these products via distribution mechanisms that are convenient to us – whether through one-stop shopping, twenty-four-hour superstores, home delivery or some equally agreeable method. And we want an immediate and satisfactory customer service response when problems arise.

Our desire to remain in control in an uncertain world – combined with our insistence on having things when and how we want them – also translates into a demand for personalized marketing campaigns. The reality is that mass marketing is obsolete in high-tech cultures. Complex technology-based products, increased competition and additional channels of communication have a net result of declining advertising effectiveness.

In the near term, one can expect to see many more examples of increased interactivity between advertisers and targets in the form of consumer-data collection and 1:1 marketing campaigns. In addressing the Public Relations Society of America at New York’s Harvard Club, Larry Weber commented: ‘The information economy and the new communications channels are going to require a new kind of marketing communications … Here’s one small example of a new communications channel. Imagine that you’re at your local supermarket, buying a six-pack of Coca-Cola. The scanner that recognized the six-pack of Coke also triggers a software program, which spits out a 50-cents-off coupon for a six-pack of Pepsi. Automatically. Let’s say you ignore the coupon, or you take it home and lose it. The next time you buy Coke, the scanner recognizes the Coke and your debit card. The software looks up your record, knows you didn’t respond to the last coupon, and spits out a one-dollar-off coupon for Pepsi. Next time, it’s a dollar fifty. If you don’t switch in three tries, the software gives up on you for now. That’s an actual system now being tested. Retailing is not about merchandise anymore. It’s a war of information and communication.’

The reality is that developments such as customized products and 1:1 marketing initiatives are creating in consumers an expectation that they will be catered to. In some parts of the world, mail-order goods take weeks to arrive at their destination. In the US today – because we have grown accustomed to top-flight service – many of us get impatient if we can’t have a product delivered overnight or if we’re unable to have our customer service problem solved at 3 a.m. on a Sunday. This isn’t going to go away. As new technologies are developed and as production and distribution methods are improved, consumers will grow ever more demanding, not just in the US, but around the world. Any company that thinks the way it did business in 1970 is going to cut it with today’s consumer is going to be blown away.