In recent days I have finished reading the latest biography "Selling everything: Jeff Bezos and the era of Amazon" purchased on Amazon and as I leafed through the pages I thought about how thin the line between digital and physical is today. And today the time has come to forget the division.
“In the middle between the digital and physical worlds there is always the hyper-connected man who is both user and consumer. He moves with extreme ease and becomes the severe and cynical protagonist of the experiences, thirsty for new adventures." – Luca Zambrelli
In the digital world we have actually moved from closed and ghettoized concepts to complex popular reasoning, clearing dangerous terms and idioms. Some more or less, we all feel part of this global transformation that promises increasingly new and emotional services and experiences, wherever we are and with all the means available, between the clouds and the earth.
Thus the number of electronic devices is increasing, increasingly interconnected (see wearable devices, Internet of Things) and customizable. Protocols evolve and around our smartphone the hyperconnection is created between our body and the atlas of clouds that moves on the internet and inside our homes.
I have always been fascinated by it. Today my plants communicate their health status to me via Bluetooth sensors Flower Power of Parrot. My bike is very equipped with sensors connected to each other, also capturing data from my body. There's even a device in my golf bag that exchanges data with an app on shots. In the car I read emails, Facebook and Twitter posts from the satellite screen, sending voice commands to reply to text messages. Not to mention in the kitchen, the aquariums and the TV corner between Xbox One and Kinect. And soon the Apple smart watch.
“The old digital world that surrounded me when I was growing up no longer exists today. It was a world in an evolutionary phase that today, along the path of maturation, has merged with the daily one.” – Luca Zambrelli
In my work I myself have stopped considering digital communication separate from traditional communication. I'm not even talking about digital transformation. Digital has integrated and its status has positioned itself in a fold of the everyday world, continuing its evolutionary march.
In this maturation process, one of the frontiers of greatest interest is the convergence between the online and digital experience, a fusion of actions and sensations. For example between online shopping and store with the Omnichannel concept accompanied by the following definitions: traditional brick-and-mortar retail, pure-play Internet retail and hybrid retail.
In reading Stone's book on Bezos one has the perception that the transformation is complete and that even the most obsessive men of digital purism are today tenacious supporters of convergence on the physical. Amazon opening flagships. Alibaba organizing trade fairs. On the contrary BestBuy and Tesco which open online…
“It's time to be serious consultants. “Business is Business” and Digital and physical are sides of the same coin.” – Luca Zambrelli
Bezos wants to sell everything. For this reason his evolution has no brakes. Every product can be sold online and he knows it very well, he has always told his shareholders "we will sell everything". But even though there is Business in the clouds, he is not excluding contact with the physical store and after years of digital purism his planet is also experiencing a major revamping.
I identify two key factors of Omnichannel.
The Customer Experience
This is the first key factor. Physical and digital can live separately and find distant experiential and business models. But both are linked to each other by the consumer. He is the representative and the decision maker of the turning point. His experience as a consumer, his culture, his desires, his behaviors are the drivers of the strategic decisions that today drive investments in the retail sector and beyond. Many of the recent inventions are based on people's behavior, on making life and experiences more efficient, on the manipulation of reality by changing our world, see Facebook and the Social Network crusade. My notes "If you don't do Customer Experience you don't sell" on slideshare.
Consumer service
Together with Proximity Marketing, Omnichannel paves the way for universal experience, i.e. service. We have improved the goods we sell and created a marketing and communication strategy. But above all we have improved and evolved the services through which we sell them. And this is the second important aspect of this evolutionary path.
I stop here.
“There is business in the clouds but it is here on earth that the big “business” will still be done. Clouds have become the highway of choice to travel on. Their virtualized charm has made them desired. But let's pay attention to the steps because nothing is created, nothing is destroyed but everything is transformed." – Luca Zambrelli
The idea from which this post starts is to make colleagues, managers and companies think about the theme "transformation means evolution", the same one that Darwin formulated for animal and plant species and which some "famous" economists used to explain this strange identity crisis of the global economy which certainly does not have a sense of common good.
