I love Star Trek. I love it even though the plots are pretty predictable.
The crew of the Starship Enterprise is always off to somewhere no one had gone before. When they got there they found a place that looked strangely familiar. It was either an awful lot like Kansas or an awful lot like Chicago.
The crew of the starship would be talking about this in a field or in a bar. Suddenly, in walks some creature with six heads or with eyes on stalks. A crew member would turn to their commander and say, "Ah, there's something strange here, Captain."
There was. The world and the creatures looked different. But they had the same basic motivations and drives that folks had back on Mother Earth. They might have had their eyes on stalks, but they were looking out for number one.
Marketing in the Digital Age is a lot like the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. The same basic motivations are at work that have been at work for centuries, even millennia. But the world is suddenly different in many ways.
To thrive in this world you have to understand it and how it's different from the world you came up in. Here are some of the key ways that the Digital Age is different.
Transparency
In the physical world, transparency is the characteristic of a medium that lets us see through it. Glass is transparent, so we can see what's on the other side of a window. On the Net, transparency is the ability to see prices, processes, and information that we couldn't see before.
Information transparency lets you find out things about products, customers or competitors. When I bought my last truck, I walked into the dealership knowing information about the vehicle and dealership that gave me a real edge.
Price transparency lets you compare prices from several potential vendors. It also lets your customers compare your prices with the competition.
Process transparency allows you or your customer to see into a business process. Buy a computer from Dell and you can track it from order to delivery.
Transparency shifts power down the supply chain. Buyers, and anyone below you in the chain, have more power in the Digital Age than ever before.
Transparency reduces technical competitive advantage. Technical competitive advantage is the advantage you gain from the features of your product or business. In a transparent world those things are increasingly easy to discover and copy.
This is a special problem in the case of price advantage. Using price as your primary competitive advantage was always a bit like running in front of a thresher. You had to be sure that you were lowering prices ahead of the competition, even though, most of the time, you were in a race to the bottom.
In the Digital Age, the transparency that the net brings means that you have to run faster than ever before. Transparency increases price competition, even when it's self-destructive.
Reach
Reach is the ability of a business or customer to reach people and organizations that were out of range in the old world. Want to buy books, or cleaning compounds? You used to be limited to local merchants, now you can order from folks on the other side of the world.
That's reach across geography. There's also reach across time. Now you can get information and you can buy twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. So can your customers.
Reach across relationships is important, too. That's an important part of supply chain management in the Digital Age. Distributor web sites often present information direct from manufacturers. Sometimes that same information is also available on retailer sites.
Reach lowers barriers to entry. That, in turn, increases competition.
Increased reach is a two-edged sword. It increases your opportunities to do business. But it does the same thing for your competition.
Speed
Speed is increasingly global. Now, by "global," I don't mean international. Instead, I'm using that term in a more general way. When something is "global" it shows up everywhere.
Think about our lives in this country. If you know the name of a single neurotransmitter, it is probably adrenaline. We not only have fast-food restaurants, we have express lanes at those fast-food restaurants, and Fast Pass payment to pay without slowing down. What we used to call a "New York minute" has begun to show up in our lives in places remote from that large city.
The world used to move at the speed of a letter. That meant that, often, you could measure your response time in weeks. You could take the time to craft careful replies and proposals.
Today, the world moves at the speed of an electron. When folks fill out a form on your web site, they expect an immediate reply. If you're lucky, they'll give you a day before they get frustrated waiting and go to your competition.
An increasingly common phenomenon in many markets is the buyer who does his or her research and then contacts a limited number of potential suppliers. The ones who respond first get the business.
Mobile
The world in the Digital Age is not just a world that's connected. It's connected no matter where you and your customers are.
Folks go on vacation and take their laptops with them. With wireless connections they can work in a local Starbucks or while they watch their children play on the beach. Blackberrys and other mobile email devices have begun showing up everywhere.
Cell phones have become the Swiss Army knives of the Digital Age. The new phones have text messaging capability. They can receive email. They can even take pictures and send them over the net.
Just this afternoon, I was in the supermarket watching a young man use his camera phone to send pictures of different items on one of the shelves. I asked what he was doing. "Oh," he said, "I wasn't sure which one my wife wanted, so I'm sending her pictures and letting her choose."
One contractor I know has issued picture phones to all his key workers. When they call him with a problem at a job site, he asks them to take a picture. He says it saves him hours of drives across town to look at problems.
Personal
People expect to be treated like individuals. Because companies like Dell and Amazon have taught them, they expect you to know their name and their preferences.
Your customers want to be able to track their own order status and see information on their purchasing history. They want you to know them well enough to make good recommendations.
They also expect you to use technology to help you make their lives easier and more productive. They may want you to use text messaging to let them know about a low inventory situation, or email to let them know about potential problems with, or new uses for, a particular compound.
People always wanted to be treated like one-of-a-kind individuals, but they used to be more forgiving. Now, the bar has been raised. They expect and even demand more.
Summing Up
To thrive in this world you have to understand it and how it's different from the world you came up in. Now you know some of the ways that the Digital Age is a different age.
The bad news is that the Digital Age is more challenging than any time in the history of business. But there's good news, too. The good news is that the Digital Age offers you opportunities we couldn't even dream of as little as twenty years ago.
Here's your challenge. Figure out what your customers' biggest problems are. Then find ways to meet those challenges. Figure out what their biggest wants are. Find ways to fill those wants.
Sound familiar? It should. It's the same way we've succeeded at business since the dawn of trade. Only now we get to succeed in the Digital Age.
