Have the Machines Won? How Digital Assistants Will Affects Digital Marketing to 1 Billion + Mobile Users

Christian Lowe Blog Post 2 - 01/29/2015 "The world is home to more than a billion smartphone users.1 Internet platforms are bringing those billion people together to share ideas and cocreate millions of apps that entertain us, simplify our daily tasks, and nudge us toward healthier living. Through mobile devices—and soon, sensors and the Internet of Things—the crowd is becoming personal." With over 1 Bn mobile users currently and the advancements made in sourcing customer specific data on individual preferences, buying behaviors, etc. digital marketing is becoming much more tailored to the individual. There are expectations that further technological innovations will enhance the capacity that marketers have to reach individuals with tailored messaging in real-time to the individuals. While there is much apprehension currently ammong the general consumer about companies knowing too much about them, most people should, in time, find the immense benefits that tools like mobile assistants can have in enhancing individuals' lives through improving efficiencies, predicting needs and providing promotional opportunities otherwise not available. Research has concluded that those areas of our brains that compel us to buy products will also push us to begin offloading mundane decision making to digital assistants, which will make decisions for us based on a pre-defined set of filters (i.e. spending limits, demographic and psychographic details, monthly needs, etc.). These digital assistants will act like a human assistant would in that they would handle a lot of the tasks that we may not have time for (i.e. grocery shopping, back-to-school shopping, ordering office supplies) or do not feel inclined to waste our time doing. These digital assistants will employ complex algorithms that will predict our individual needs and respond accordingly. While this may scare people to invest so much trust into an app, especially with security breaches, in time, I believe that people will come to accept these digital assistants as much as they would with an actual human assistant, only that the digital assistant probably can be trusted more than an individual person who can forget to do things for you or is limited in his/her capacity to scour the internet for the best deals for you possible. It will be an interesting technological development as well as a development between the individual interacts with the digital market. As such, this will provide a wealth of opportunities for digital marketers to not just target people but to figure out the right messaging that would be accepted by these digital assistants as something that would be beneficial to individual. Promotional responses should become much more mathematical and therefore predictable if digital marketers are able to successfully crack how to reach these digital assistants in the near future. Should be very interesting how the industry develops! "Within the next two years, autonomous mobile assistant purchasing will reach $2 billion annually. That means about 2.5% of mobile users will trust their digital assistants with $50 per year. Digital assistants will be on multiple platforms; however, mobile will be the most accessible, adopted device for digital assistants and will be the “killer application” by the end of 2016." Good articles that discuss how customers are shopping and their expectations for mobile applications going forward: http://gartnernews.com/digital-assistants-go-shopping/ http://dupress.com/articles/personalizing-customer-experiences-analytics/