Connecting With Warm Bodies – High Tech vs High Touch
From dead celebrities resurrected using CGI, to puppet politicians manipulated using advanced facial and voice imitating software, to lifelike Facebook avatars for you and I (which means you could soon star in your own fake news video, without your knowledge), it’s harder than ever for people to trust anything they hear and see online.
End result? nobody trusts anybody. In this talk we unpack how businesses can use technology to enhance rather than diminish human relationships and connections as a form of competitive advantage. Topics covered include:
– Data discrimination – In the future, the privileged will increasingly be processed by people, while the masses will be processed by machines, which it comes to employment opportunities, access to products, privileges and services.
– Consumer backlash against privacy invasion and discriminatory “price diversity” managed by biased bots and algorithms.
– Legal restrictions that limit consumer data collection (e.g. GDPR in the EU or POPPI in South Africa); and proposed legislation that will force companies to financially compensate consumers for collecting and using their data
-The perils of the platform economy, by taking advantage of the convenience and connections of big-tech platforms owned by the FAANGs, (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google etc) and super apps (WeChat and Alipay, which combined connect 30% of the world’s population) smaller companies need to understand that they no longer own the relationship with their own consumers.
– Unconscious consumerism: As consumers (and businesses) increasingly outsource their purchase decisions of algorithms and artificially intelligent voice activated personal assistants, brands and businesses will increasingly find themselves selling to machines rather than to humans – and, as such, competing in a zero-sum, lowest-cost game.
– The trade off between big brands and big data – A brand requires shared value and community; this is at odds with big data hyper-personalisation strategies that focus on a unique product and offer for each and every individual consumer.
– In defence of the human touch – Brand value (and margin) is to be found in building and developing real irrational human relationships based on trust, emotion and shared value.
“Most problems don’t require more data. They require more insight, more innovation and better eyes.Information is what we call it when a human being takes data and turns it into a useful truth.” ~ Seth Godin
This presentation is designed for business leaders, sales teams, marketers and HR departments – in short any business or role that involves interacting with human beings.