Copyright Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist

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Future technology in marketing

Ian Pearson, BT Exact, Feb 2003

Marketing has very fuzzy edges. All kinds of activities can stimulate markets, often unintentionally. Osama bin Laden is an unpaid marketeer for McAfee, by stimulating demand for their anti-virus products, and Microsoft helps market heartburn tablets. Marketing will get even fuzzier.

Prior to the launch of new 3G telecomms services, there was a lot of hype about location based services. Pizza houses could let previous customers know of special offers as they approach the restaurant, and so on. I am very sceptical about the attractiveness of such services, which are more likely to irritate than to attract customers. Most will be about as welcome as junk emails, and such features are likely to be disabled by customers. Other 3G services that are heavily profile dependent might be more acceptable, provided that they work primarily for the benefit of the customer rather than the marketeer. Pull advertising might work, while push advertising will fail. I will pay to get information I want, but will pay not to receive information I don't want.

There is now a new buzz about tag based customisation. Radio frequency ID tags will cost only a few cents each and store the identity of any object. This allows the object to be linked to any electronic functionality on the network. Customers could look at an object and instead of asking a poorly trained assistant for information, could find out all about it on the network. Their personal profile (the customer could be identified by a tag in their loyalty card) could be consulted to make sure the information is tailored to their needs. Advances such as these will obviously have an impact on marketing precision when it comes to adapting to different customers. But by adding cyberspace functionality to any object, they can also open whole new markets. It is suddenly as if the object has two existences, one in the real world and one in the computer.

Imagine eating a Bassetts' Jelly Baby. Now imagine eating a future jelly baby, if Bassetts have decided to enhance them with silicone edible-electronic tags. Because of its sophisticated cyberspace part, the jelly baby can now scream (through your PC speakers or Bluetooth headphones), and can fight back. It could link to its friends on a peer to peer network, and organise a denial of service attack on your home PC, or launch a virus and trash your hard drive. Jelly baby eating would be elevated to an extreme sport, with the perceived danger and thrill of big game hunting. Now imagine what price Bassetts could sell them for. Marketeers will be able to enhance many everyday commodity products by adding some imaginative cyberspace linkages to them.

Marketeers will be able to take this a stage further. They have linked the product into cyberspace and enhanced its value. Now they can grow the cyberspace part, make more of it, spread into adjacent areas, and increase the product breadth. The cyberspace part may often become more valuable than the initial product, and can then be spun off as a standalone product or service. This could even be a launch strategy for a cyberspace product, such as a web site. Make an attractive physical product that links to the cyberspace one. With the physical item acting simply as a lure. Then we have gone full circle, since this is like using a ball-point pen with a web-site URL on the side. This begs the question, whether it is better to make pens and sell the marketing potential, or to start with the other product and then find a suitable 'pen'. Either way could be successful.

However, it is by imaginatively using the combination of physical and cyberspace that the best products can be made, not just by using one of them as a link to the other. A child's doll has more play value of it links to the computer and the net. It allows the child to access more intelligence than can be included economically in the doll itself, and allows activities such as networking with other doll owners. Manufacturers may be able to sell virtual doll's houses on-line, and allow the child to customise them, rather like on 'The Sims'. I would expect to see physical doll accessories for 'The Sims' either this Christmas or next to complete the circle again. Dolls may have social lives with other dolls on the same street, with little girls partly watching these living soaps, and partly orchestrating them.

This all sounds like child's play, but we are seeing a huge increase in the amount of play time for adults too. Millions of adults play on-line games such as Everquest, some of them in their forties or older. Some of these games are spilling over into real life, with conventions and accessories, even down to marketing game status and skills on e-Bay. Some people already use these games to meet their friends. Attractive virtual locations can be developed and hired for meetings, training, communication, shopping and so on. Virtual environments are where the domains of mental space and cyberspace converge. Physical and mental convergence has been with us for millennia, from toys to filing cabinets. The convergence of physical space with cyberspace will be mainly demonstrated through on-line toys and tag based services. All three of these domains will interact strongly, and the result will be more products and services, bigger marketplaces, and most importantly a place where the border between the product and clever marketing disappear.