The Future of Communication
Conversation
Facilitation
Participation
Creation
Speech by Futurist: Ben
Hourahine
2006
Copyright Ben
Hourahine 2006
Tonight I am going to talk to you about the future of
communication.
To do this I am going to take you through the 4 key
trends that will define the future of your business.
My first trend relates to one of the fastest growing
activities in the world - talking.
My first trend for the future is:
Conversation
The ability to hold a conversation is the access point
to modern society.
This applies to every member of society, including us
as communicators and our clients.
In the
Half a century ago talking about your feelings was unacceptable; now it is
encouraged at every opportunity.
So how is this feeding through to the commercial
environment? Well the message for corporations and brands is:
‘Talk with me, not at me’.
The impact of this trend is already here with
declining TVC expenditure and a growing focus on interactions over impressions.
But when I talk of conversation, I am not talking
about interactivity alone. Interactivity will be a hygiene factor for the
future consumer:
True conversation is interaction with character, or,
more literally, interaction with a character.
One of the best examples of this is Innocent in the
Being ‘innocent’ runs through every brand
communication they undertake as we can see: [VIDEO]
How should your client’s brand talk?
How should it listen?
What is the true character of its communication?
For me this is the battlefield of future communications.
As one cartoonist has put it:
"On the internet, no one knows you're a
dog."
(Peter Steiner, The
New Yorker, July 5, 1993, pg 61)
In 2010, how
you talk and how you listen will
define who you are.
But what if your client isn’t involved in consumer
conversations or isn’t the subject of them, what do you do?
The answer to this question brings me on to our next
key trend:
Facilitation
‘The future
belongs to marketers who ignite consumer networks and then get out of the way
and let them talk’.
(Seth Godin, Unleashing
the Ideas Virus, 2001.)
We are only just beginning to witness the true power
of social networks and at this point I’d like to give a prediction:
Within a years time you will be competing for attention
within social networks, as opposed to just across them.
Last year the social networking website myspace
displaced eBay as the fourth busiest site on the Internet and recorded twice as
many page views as Google.
Myspace is now adding a million new users a week and
it is only one of many social networking sites that are exploding at present.
Social networks are bottom up systems and feeding
ground level swells to the top of management structures means using these very
networks within and across our own companies.
The lessons from the corporate sector then are about
relinquishing control and providing ‘spaces of possibility’. IBM is using
blogs, wikis and podcasts as communication tools in its day-to-day business
and, if clients are, we should be to…
To return to our consumer trends: Facilitating virtual
networks is only one route in and the second leads to my third trend for the
evening:
Participation
Participation is facilitation in practice. On the street’s
of
In 2030, a child will be asking ‘Daddy, where did you
meet mummy? At the Beck’s bar son, it was love at first sight’ and you just
can’t argue with that.
Participation has many facets and ‘communication
through context’ is only one.
The Beastie Boys have released a fan created film in
the
The result is an energetic anarchic collage that
speaks the language of their brand and presents the event completely from the
audience’s perspective.
For me participation is a much more useful concept
than ‘experience’, which has been in vogue for some time, in reality we
experience everything and yet we only participate if we are ready and willing.
I am sure you have all heard of the growing number of
professional resellers on eBay?
Well the same rules apply to the transfer of
communication messages as they do to the goods sold on eBay.
People will only pass on marketing messages or sell
goods on eBay, when there is capital to be gained by doing so. For the latter
this is economic capital, for the former, cultural capital - a much harder
concept to tie down.
Understanding the cultural
capital of your consumers and applying this right through the line requires
unique thinking that is essential for igniting participation.
So how do foster cultural capital for a client, beyond
wrapping their logo around a humorous mpeg?
Ultimately by creating culture itself.
The most successful companies of the future will be
what I term ‘the creators’ and my final theme for tonight is just that:
Creation
A brand that creates is a brand that thinks, a brand
that is in touch, and a brand that is leading change.
The ipod is the greatest example of brand creation to
date.
Apple took a complicated technology – MP3 file formats
and made them invisible. The ipod re-communicated the technology in both a
literal and visual way. We no longer talk of MP3’s we talk of ‘my tunes’ or
‘itunes’ and grey headphones are definitely out.
So how did Apple do this? Well, they engineered the
ipod from the user’s perspective. Steve Jobs produced a mock-up of the casing,
complete with interface, and said to his engineers ‘make me the technology to
go inside’.
An ipod is just an accessible hard-drive and yet it
has completely redefined our relationship with music, through a user lead
communications framework.
Other brand creators include Coke, which through its live and local events, has given under
18’s a chance to see their favorite bands, where previously they were excluded
by age.
The opportunities for brand creation are essentially
limitless.
At the root of these executions though is affinity of
interest, which has moved these brands from being preachers to trusted
partners.
So there is our last key trend for the evening, creation,
and now its time to wrap-up:
Conclusion
All the trends I have spoken about are part of a
single, much larger shift. This shift is the closing gap between culture and
commerce.
All these trends mean moving closer to the consumer in
the short-term and in the long term could mean that the division between
corporation and consumer will no longer exist.
The successful companies of the future will be those
that have a strong affinity of interest with their consumers and push mutual agendas to the advantage of both.
The trends I have discussed tonight will put you in
prime position to be in the right space when this time comes.
To summarize then, the future communications landscape
will be defined by companies who:
Converse with character
Facilitate social interaction
Deliver active participation
Create new cultural realities.
The challenge is there. Thank you for your time. Any
questions?
i. BBC News, 20 May, 2004
Copyright Ben
Hourahine 2006