Trends Identified
Custom at all Costs - Playing new games with price
Price sensitivity remains a key and determining feature of the consumer landscape, and recent years have seen much price elasticity innovation to appeal to consumers (even the relatively well- off) engaged in a daily battle against unnecessary largesse in the aisles. In 2018 and beyond, anticipate further dismantling of RRP and a growing tendency to permit flexible, time-sensitive, lifestyle- and lifestage- personalised, progressive pricing models to differentiate and entice.
2018
Trending 2018
Foresight Factory
Mechanised Truth - Centralised routes to corporate truth-building
Truth, trust, believability – all under serious pressure in a consumer landscape developing a healthy disrespect for traditional arbiters of truth and authority, and where claim and counter-claim on any given issue mean that settled, mainstream truths are in short supply. Enter new, centralised routes to commercial truth- building that herald a future in which tangible, mechanised truths more robustly challenge emotionally-charged “alternative facts” and meet a significant need for corporate transparency.
2018
Trending 2018
Foresight Factory
The dawn of the coded brand
Brands will hardwire behaviors into their actual coding in unprecedented ways. This will offer customers a consistent experience no matter when or where they meet a brand.
2018
Trend watch 2018: the next five
Landor
The rise of the merchant technocrat
Convenience, community, and creativity will change the retail landscape. The result? A new paradigm for consumption that brings the store to consumers.
2018
Trend watch 2018: the next five
Landor
The surge of smart products and packages
Packaging as we know it is on the way out. Breakthroughs in manufacturing and materials are dramatically altering how brands present and produce their wares.
2018
Trend watch 2018: the next five
Landor
The mobility revolution
As radically innovative forms of mobility hit the mainstream, the way we move around will change forever.
2018
Trend watch 2018: the next five
Landor
The primacy of purpose
Today’s brands must be purposeful and provide the services customers want while fulfilling steep demands for accountability and transparency. The business model of the future will require giving back—to employees, to communities, and to the planet.
2018
Trend watch 2018: the next five
Landor
Immersive Technologies – Enhancing the Digital Experience
Two distinct but merging technologies are behind immersive technologies: Virtual Reality (VR), computer- generated, digital environments that fully immerse users in a virtual world and Augmented Reality (AR), which overlays digital information on the physical world and augmented reality operating environments. Companies are already experimenting in pilot projects and the technology has the potential to become the next computing platform. Mobile devices are currently at the center of the implementation of AR/ VR and they could replace large parts of the PC landscape. We observe a co-evolution with digital twins and gaming. Hardware is important, but the user experience such as ease and comfort of use and real-time performance as well as a structured content are keys for success. High data quality including realtime analytics is also a prerequisite. Immersive Technologies are still in early development and are five to ten years from wide mainstream adoption. They currently show a slower adoption than smartphones but will probably experience a similar cost reduction and speed up significantly cost reduction and development speed. Hardware vendors are accelerating computing and speeding up application performance and vendors are already developing and offering enterprise-level collaboration tools and augmented reality operating environments. For now, the clumsiness of the current devices has reduced mobility and the cost for adopting content are slowing progress and cybersecurity and safety of usage remain issues. Immersive technologies promise unique user experiences including 3D interactions, new ways of data handling, and interaction with the physical world and has the potential to accelerate and simplify business practices or even invent new ones. Use cases are hands-free tasks like in field service and maintenance, digital twins for operations, architecture, real-estate etc., live media streams, and augmented information for any digital supported workplace.
2018
Trend Report 2018 - Emerging Technology Trends
SAP
Conversational Systems and User Interfaces –Talking to Machines
Machine Learning has reached a state in which conversational systems can have increasingly engaging and human like conversations. These chatbots or digital assistants use mainly natural language processing (NLP) to interact with humans but will use sight, sound, tactile, etc. in the near future as well. Conversational systems can be viewed as a step towards true personal virtual assistants and will replace most common interfaces, simplifying human-machine interactions and replacing less interactive interfaces. The technology will probably merge in part with Immersive technologies and will also leverage the digital network of sensors, appliances, and IoT systems to interact with humans. The chatbot ecosystem is already robust, with many different third-party chatbots, native bots, distribution channels, and enabling technology companies. Messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Tencent’s WeChat, Google Allo, Apple iMessage, Slack and Kik all use chatbots as well as voice-controlled consumer devices like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google Assistant and SAP Co-Pilot. While the focus is on consumer applications right now, especially based on mobile technologies, chatbots will go business very fast, allowing businesses to leverage the inexpensive and wide-reaching technology to engage with more consumers and to support, simplify and speed-up many business processes. Examples are commerce applications as taxi cab ordering (such as Uber), concierge facilities (such as Sephora), B2B contract workfl ows (such as Apttus), food ordering (such as Domino’s Pizza) and others. Use cases for chatbots are helping humans to use technology without the need to know technology like in navigating and exploring, automated customer services, and supporting functions for hand-busy tasks in fi eld service, logistics, maintenance, medicine and others.
2018
Trend Report 2018 - Emerging Technology Trends
SAP
Robotic Process Automation – Rule-Based Bots
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) refers to rule-based and easily programmed software, that promises to eliminate repetitive, easily automated tasks. RPAs are fully programmed, cannot learn and have to be updated when IT systems change. RPA is seen as a next step towards automation where machine learning is not needed. It can be tied together with machine learning to automate more complex tasks to create intelligent enterprises. Most RPA today uses text analytics, image processing, text search, or optical character recognition. Analytics will become critical as RPA will soon be developed towards more smarter versions. While we are heading towards an automated world, the process seems to take longer than anticipated and is more complex than anticipated, so RPAs could be a fast forward solution for those processes that yet do not need sophisticated algorithms. For now, a central control of bots is not fully established and changes of IT systems could lead to expensive updates. Besides that, RPA can boost productivity with minimal process change, it offers easy-to-calculate ROIs and it is an in-route to more complex automation with machine learning.
2018
Trend Report 2018 - Emerging Technology Trends
SAP