Avoiding Touch Point Whack-A-Mole

Are you a marketer? Are you finding it increasingly difficult to keep track of your customers? Feel like the number of touch points you have to keep track of is growing exponentially? 

I've been thinking a lot about 

If you’ve ever wondered what will replace the smartphone, the answer is that nothing will. Or actually, everything will.

Pervasive computing will become the norm. After all, Gartner predicts there will be 20 billion connected things in existence by 2020, up from about 7 billion today.

Currently, digital signage, smart kiosks and even connected dressing rooms are all shaping the way consumers and businesses interact with technology (and each other), and we are on the cusp of another wave of sweeping tech change, including self-driving cars, drones, artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

Yet the mobile paradigm persists. We look at IoT (Internet of Things) devices and assume they will function like smartphones. This is the pattern of how humans process the emergence of technologies, and there are unfortunate consequences. The first television ads were more or less radio copy complemented with moving images of a spokesperson.

When the World Wide Web became a reality in the early ’90s, media companies used magazines and newspapers as their template for content. In the early days of smartphones, people assumed that they would work like desktop computers. In his 2007 iPhone introduction, Steve Jobs showed off  The New York Times on the Safari web browser because everyone thought that you’d use your phone to surf the web instead of employing apps.

Now, we’re making the same mistake again. We assume that mobile is a template for the post-mobile age — but it’s not…….

Read the rest of my thoughts on this over at Martech Today!