5 Digital Trends Shaping the Consumer Experience

Macala Wright is the publisher of FashionablyMarketing.Me, one of the leading fashion and retail industry business websites. She is a retail consultant and business strategist who specializes in marketing consulting for fashion, luxury and lifestyle brands. You can follower her on Twitter at @InsideFMM or @Macala.

The impact of recent economic events has created a lasting shift in the average consumer. Consumers are no longer seeking to use social networks to just broadcast, connect, and share their lives. Now, they also want deeper online and offline experiences for fulfillment.

In fact, they prefer those experiences over products. So as marketers, what are the trends driving consumers from a socially-based consumption model to one of experience? Here are the top five.

1. Visual Thinking

Visual thinking — the use and exploration of images as tools for communication — began as a trend in education in an attempt to improve learning and retention. Over the past decade it has evolved and been adopted as a strategy tool for marketers and management firms to help clients find answers to complex problems and map out their solutions via large-scale visuals. The process can be applied to any subject matter and used to assist and augment improvement in any audience or demographic.

Currently, the most comprehensive and impressive visual thinking work has been constructed by London-based firm, Group Partners. Group Partners' progressive approach allows solutions to be co-created with the client through the application of its business equation. "Co-creation, visualization, and logical structure applied to the important conversations in your business will transform the way you think and act, and quickly," says said John Caswell, founder of Group Partners.

The company has applied this technique to more than 2,500 businesses and governments, including Coca-Cola, Estee Lauder, Rolls-Royce, and The BBC. The framework can be used to solve any problem or develop value based on any business question. As the world moves towards thinking in pictures and processing information through graphics, the use of visual thinking is becoming more compelling.

2. The New Aesthetic

The term new aesthetic was coined by James Bridle, a London-based writer and "technologist." It refers to the blurring of digital and real. In September 2011, The Future Laboratory and Campaign explored the blurring digital and real-life experiences in retail via a Sweet Shoppe.

The Sweet Shoppe — set up as an installation during London Design Festival — was turned into a hyper-real, personalized and technology-enabled production that let guests see, smell, touch, and taste the retail experience. For example, on arrival, guests were taken on a 20-minute curated personal journey to determine their perfect sweet.

Without question, this version of the Sweet Shoppe was created to appeal to the consumers of the future who will have no recollection of life without the internet, will not distinguish between the real and digital worlds, and will seek experiences that seamlessly integrate the online and the offline.

Currently, the new aesthetic remains fragmented and extremely hard to put into a coherent example that would allow a marketer to grasp its full potential. But, because the subject matter of aesthetics relates to how beauty is perceived and valued by us as humans, retailers are making strides to test it via digital consumer experiences.

One example comes from luxury retailer Louis Vuitton, who worked with Yayoi Kusama to launch the Louis Vuitton Kusama Studio iPhone application. Louis Vuitton encourages users to reinvent reality and the world through this artist's work and transforms user photos with effects designed by Kusama. The app embraces concepts of the new aesthetic movement and provides marketers a way to grasp the full potential of the movement as an experiential marketing tactic.

3. Calm Technology

Calm technology refers to applications that cut down on the digital noise of high-volume data to show the user only enough information so that he or she is able to focus on a task. Mark Weiser is considered to be the father of "ubiquitous computing," a synonym for calm technology. The whole idea is to reduce distractions to our workflow without losing functionality. Weiser postulated that we should not be seeking to enter the virtual world by shopping in 3D environments, but that digital technology should enter our lives in such a way as to make it calmer and easier, not more distracted and disrupted, thus blurring the line between digital and real life experiences.

The Facebook ticker is one example. If the Facebook newsfeed updated in real time, then it might move too quickly for the average user. But by moving real-time updates to the periphery, the user has a more calm and satisfying Facebook experience.

Calm technology is also leading the growing popularity of curation and social product discovery sites such as Lyst, Mulu.Me, Buyosphere, Svpply, and Discoveredd. These sites offer a more focused stream of content than standard social networks. Moreover, the rise of interest networks, solely following someone based on similar likes and shared interest topics, is another way that calm technology has impacted user behavior.

To be clear, calm technology does not necessarily jibe with marketing goals. The whole idea is to reduce the flow of information to people, not increase it. The public, however, seems to be ready for applications that will streamline the information, something marketers know has inherent value.

4. Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing is a new field of marketing research that studies consumers' cognitive response to marketing stimuli. Instead of simply using focus groups, companies are beginning to use science and higher understanding of brain function to makes websites "sticky" and manipulate consumers into purchasing their products.

Neuromarketing's premise is that consumer buying decisions are made in split seconds in the subconscious, emotional part of the brain. The ultimate goal of neuromarketing is to blow consumer minds with products they deeply desire, thus driving their purchases. The satisfaction of the purchases would incite product loyalty while allowing brands to increase their profitability and business process.

Neuromarketing as a discipline came out of a study of participants in the "Pepsi Challenge," according to a PBS report. The report states that marketers still don't fully understand how to apply this data, but that hasn't stop people from opening or buying agencies that offer such a service.

5. Singularity

singularity is the concept that technology is on the verge of becoming smarter than humans. Once technology surpasses the human capacity to understand the world, our race will enter a new era that we literally cannot imagine because we do not have the brainpower to do so.

Game theory is one of the key components in the theoretical research surrounding singularity. Marketers can make the argument that by having multiple people taking the same action at once, in ways that are deemed safe by them, they can drive massive change. According to Gartner's 2011 study of Gamification, the opportunities for businesses range from having more engaged customers, to creating more brand narratives. When you overlay game theory with current trends marketers can start to see that singularity really is a bridge that connects the everyday and the fantastical.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto