This content relates to : NEW PRODUCT & SERVICE DEVELOPMENT
Aric Rindfleisch
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
It’s a pleasure to be with you. I want to speak just for a short time, about some thoughts I have of what innovation might look like in the year 2030, which actually is not that far away. And my premise is that in the next 8 years we might, I think it’s a very good chance we may see more innovation between now and the year 2030 than we’ve seen in the past 30, 40 or 50 years combined.
So I’m going to give an example. So here today in the year 2022, if you’re a human, you probably own a car that you park when you go to work and you earn money at your job to pay for that car and that’s how most people operate at least in North America. And that basic arrangement with an automobile is really not that much different in 2022 than it was 20 years ago in the year 2002 or even 40 years ago when I started driving in 1982. So despite all the changes we’ve had since that time and the dramatic changes brought by the digital revolution, this aspect of our lives has remained relatively the same for many, many decades.
Now we all know that it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future as Yogi Berra used to tell us, maybe we have some Yankee fans in the Syracuse audience. I’d like to make 5 specific predictions about the future and this is also a test of your color perception, so let’s go ahead and begin.
The first prediction, I predict that by the year 2030, you won’t have to park your car anymore. So why do I say that? Well, as you know, we have a number of firms, such as Tesla, engaged in using artificial intelligence to develop self-driving cars and part of that feature is to not only drive the car autonomously but to park the car autonomously. So this is a mockup, not an actual product at this time, but many who follow this industry believe that in the next few years Tesla will develop an automobile that has no steering wheel because none is needed if the car is driving by itself.
So why is that important in terms of how we live, both as consumers, but also how we think about the world as marketers? Let me ask you a question. If you think about New York City, at any 1 point, what percentage of automobiles drive around Manhattan looking for a place to park? Well, according to many estimates, the number in cities like New York or Chicago, L.A., San Francisco is up to 1/3. So at any one time, 33% of the automobiles that are driving around the city are actually looking for a place to park.
So imagine if cars no longer have to park because they’re dropping us off and going either to a far away destination outside the city to park or simply picking up other passengers in a ridesharing agreement. So that has tremendous implications for traffic flow, for the use of parking garages, just how we move about and navigate urban landscapes. So that is one protection for the year 2030 that in the future you will not have to park your car because it will never have to park.
So one implication of this is that new offerings such as automobiles will become more independent. So what do we mean by that? Well many things that we use, like automobiles, require a degree of human interaction. So once we have this autonomous future and we no longer need a human to engage in the actual usage of a product like an automobile, we’re seeing the separation between the 2 and so your time is available to do something else. So as you’re waiting for your car to drop you off, you can read a book, do some homework, conduct a business transaction.
In fact, you may have heard a recent announcement that Tesla has announced, this was actually, leaked, with Zoom and you’re probably using Zoom all the time, I’m sure, that Zoom is now engaged in a partnership with Tesla and will soon be offering Zoom in Tesla automobiles. Now, this feature probably has limited use at the present, because most of us would rather conduct a Zoom meeting, perhaps in a coffee shop or at our desk than in our car.
However, we can see as we move towards autonomous driving that perhaps we use the time that we’d use to drive our car now that we’re independent of driving to conduct business meetings as we’re moving about our lives.
Prediction number 2, I predict that by the year 2030, you will own fewer things than you do today. And one reason that I offer this prediction is the World Economic Forum, which you may have heard about, has issued this pronouncement by the year 2030, you will own nothing and you’ll be happy like this young man here. Now that may be a bit of extreme to say you’ll own nothing, but they predict that we will own fewer things. And one of the reasons that the World Economic Forum is suggesting this proposition is due to the advent of new developments, like sharing economy.
So many people, perhaps some of you no longer need to own an automobile at all because we take advantage of ridesharing platforms like Uber and Lyft and also using platforms for other things such as delivering our food. So today in the year 2022, many of us do not have to use, excuse me, many of us do not have to own an automobile to use an automobile, so we’re separating ownership from usage. So one implication of this that we don’t often think about is the impact of the sharing economy and not owning things unbranded. So if you’re a marketing student, you probably have had a heavy dose of courses about branding and possibly brand equity in strong brands and how branding is part of the consumer experience. All those things are true here in 2022. But branding is inherently based on ownership. It’s the reason that we care about brands is because we own those brands or we desire to own those brands.
Now, in the world of which we are not owning a product, we’re just using it such as a Uber or a Lyft, branding may be less important. So think about the last time you were in an Uber or a Lyft. Did you care about the brand of automobile that picked you up? Did you care if it was a Volkswagen or a Chevy or some other brand? Probably not. You probably cared about other factors such as how soon it would arrive, especially if you’re in the cold or rain, how friendly your driver was and did you get to your destination on time. So as we own fewer things, branding should become less important. And that has tremendous implications for marketing because so much of marketing expenditures are built for brand-building messages.
So in a world in which we are not owning, consumers aren’t owning the products, perhaps managers need to spend less or can afford to spend less resources on branding and diverting those resources to other things such as perhaps product development, you know, better distribution, stronger customer service, so that’s something to keep an eye out for is the impact of shared resources, like automobiles, upon our need to engage in expensive brand-building.
Number 4, this should be prediction number 3. My apologies. Prediction number 3, you will be a cyborg. So if you’ve never heard the term cyborg before, that means a being that is combined human and machine together in some combination. And there are some folks like Elon Musk who say, because of things like this, our smartphone, we’re already part cyborg because this technology allows us to do things that we couldn’t do before.
Here is one interesting recent development and you may have seen this video. You can find this on YouTube. Just type in “monkey playing pong”. And that’s what you’re seeing here. This is a monkey and he is breathing, excuse me, that’s actually a feeding tube. He gets rewarded. And he is playing Pong, which is a very ancient video game, one of the first video games back in the early 80s. That’s what you see on the screen. Those 2 lines, those white lines on the left and right are paddles and the players are basically paddling a ball between one another. So through advancements in neurotransmitters, this monkey has had a chip implanted into its brain and this is from one of Elon
Musk companies called Neuralink. And this chip allows the monkey to play Pong by simply thinking about moving the cursor.
If you go to the YouTube video, you can see this happening in real-time, so this is a very interesting development. You have here this monkey who’s taken on these super, I don’t want to say superhuman, perhaps super-monkey abilities to be able to play a video game just by thinking about where to move the cursor. And there are many who believe that this technology will be quickly improved and will be available to insert into humans.
Now we’re perhaps a bit off in that and I’m sure there’ll be many ethical and maybe religious challenges here. And many will see this as something, a path, they prefer not to travel down, but many will take this option. And so the early development of this technology is designed to help individuals who have neurological deficits such as Parkinson’s disease.
There’s some talk this could even cure blindness for some folks, but this merger of this digital technology with the human form is currently on the horizon. This will happen. So if you think about what are the implications of people becoming cyborgs, of us having essentially, essentially what it comes down to is having the ability of this phone but not using our hands but having it input into our brain. And imagine being able to call your friends just by thinking about them, surfing the web, just by thinking about a topic you’d like to know more about.
So what does that mean? Well, if you think about how you buy products today online, we have this ability to compare a pair of products. So many websites will offer the ability to compare different options, so you can compare them on price and different features.
But it’s not always easy to do, always easy to do. Now if we have a chip implanted, one implication is we’ll have the ability to instantly compare products on their benefits. We’ll be able to quickly, almost seamlessly compare the different options of a cell phone, an automobile, new tires, whatever you may be looking for and pick the option that’s best for us. So if we have this world in which everything can be compared instantly, I believe that these offerings will be less likely to compete on benefits. Now why is that? Well, essentially we’ll have a commodity condition in which, to be purchased, our products will be very similar in terms of their benefits, at least in terms of price of product class. So we have this ability to compare everything and as a result, the competitors are matching each other and many features, then how do we approach that? How do we actually prefer one product over another? So some of the actual benefits, perhaps or the other considerations such as the symbolic value, how it fits into our lifestyle or increasing today’s trends of the values that they represent. So is this a blue product or a red product? Does the company stand for what I believe in?
So I believe that because of this cyborg-like ability and this instant capacity to compare, perhaps the many dimensions, we’ll be looking for more subjective rather than objective features in terms of making a decision on what actual product or service to purchase.
Okay, prediction number 3 as we know is prediction number 4, my apologies, you will work, you will work less. Perhaps this is good news, perhaps it’s bad news and this has been predicted for a long time. Back in the early 1900s, there was a prediction by the year 2000 people would work only 20 hours a week so we’ve been predicting this for a long time. It hasn’t come yet but I believe it is on the horizon.
So one reason we may work less is that, and one reason is that we have the development of these robots. And you may have seen this development. We have both humanoid and non-humanoid-looking robots. This is the CyberOne out of china, a recent humanoid robot.
We know that Tesla’s also working on a Tesla bot. And the idea behind these robots is they’ll be able to replace humans in terms of doing repetitious, boring, or dangerous tasks. So imagine the year 2030 and now you have this robot assistant, perhaps you bought or maybe are leasing this robot to handle all those tasks that you prefer not to do. They range from household tasks, which is perhaps cleaning your house, painting your house, changing a tire or perhaps these robots may even do some of your work for you.
So imagine your robot goes to work while you stay at home and do something else with your time. So that’s a huge, huge possible change. Imagine where there’s meetings in which, you no longer attend, and my robot meets with your robot. That is not that unlikely, that is actually quite possible as we move forward in developing this technology. So as a result, if we have this tremendous amount of discretionary time and we have these robots doing tasks that we would normally do, this frees up a tremendous amount of time. So as a result, if we have large amounts of time, we should be less concerned about maximizing our time to be more productive.
So today, many new offerings focus on enhancing our productivity. So computers, for example, we have a lot of business to business offerings, that are productivity enhancers. But if we have this robot assistant doing much of our work productivity becomes less and less of a concern. So this might be an interesting change. And so these products that are productivity enhancing, may be less appealing and products that have nothing to do with productivity, they are just enjoyable. Imagine, you know, video games is one example. They take on increased importance in our lives as we look to fill that time that is probably productive with non-productive leisure activity.
Okay, finally prediction number 5. And I believe this is the most, perhaps the mostly impactful of all these 5 predictions. The one that may have the biggest change in your life moving forward and this prediction is simple. You won’t have any money. So what do I mean by that? Well, you may have heard this term, CBDC, or Central Bank Digital Currencies. And this is developing and is happening all across our planet. There are a few countries who have actually began this experiment.
So the idea here is to create a digital currency that is controlled by the country’s central bank, in this country, it’d be the Federal Reserve, who issues the currency. And every transaction flows through a centralized registered repository. So this is viewed as sort of an alternative to crypto currency, but in many ways, the antithesis.
So one of the defining features of crypto currency, like bitcoin, is that the centralization aspect through the watching. And this idea is the exact opposite. It is digital, like a crypto currency, but rather being decentralized, it is centralized as the name, central, right, and CBDC, centralized by the government. So one of the thoughts here is that this is a way in which governments can help reduce illegal activity, protect the population, those are the positives, but there are others who are concerned about this possible change, this development and saying that the government will be able to restrict purchasing of certain crops. Will that happen? We’re not sure, we’re not sure. But there is a possibility that the centralization of currency through a central bank will eliminate or alter many transactions, so let me give you one example.
So in Australia, there’s legislation that has restricted or eliminated all branding on cigarettes. So the Australian government has decided, like many governments have, have all reached the same conclusion that smoking is a large risk to public health and a cause of considerable mortality and sickness and has tried hard to reduce smoking among its population. So they’ve moved to legislation and have removed all branding. So if you buy cigarettes in Australia, you no longer see brand names. Instead you see very graphic images of the impact of smoking on your health. So that has had some effect, but it’s relatively a rough instrument because people, some people choose to ignore this and still smoke even though there are no more brands and the basic product that tells you that it will also may kill you. Now this is a much finer instrument.
So imagine with the centralized currency, things such as cigarettes or perhaps a high-sugar soda or other products that are deemed to be bad for our health may be restricted or perhaps prohibited. So perhaps you have a cigarette limit, so 1 pack a month. If you choose to buy more than that, that spigot of money is turned off. Now there are some debates whether this will actually happen in the U.S. However, it was just announced recently earlier this week that one aspect of the one part of the Federal Reserve is working with a number of banks, including [inaudible] Morgan Stanley, to test market a centralized currency. And this initiative is liked to take an increased interest given some of the recent declines of crypto currency platforms such as the FTX.
So my guess is that by the year 2030, we will most likely have a centralized digital currency in this country and many other countries and for awhile we still have paper money but at some point that will be turned off and every transaction will be centralized and monitored by the government for good or for bad, but that has tremendous implications.
So what does that mean? Now we talk a lot about marketing, about, you know, B2C, business to consumer or B2B, business to business but we also have a third aspect that’s B2G, business to government. So firms such as Boeing or Lockheed Martin, do a lot of business with the federal government and very profitable business with the federal government. So as a result, if we have a centralized currency, our currency is issued by the government, most new offerings will be increasingly, in effect, business to government transactions. So what does that mean? Well, we have to see how this unfolds. But B2G is a much different environment than B2B or B2C, so in essence what that means is that we all become customers of the government. And we have to think about the government in a new way, not just as something that protects us or provides services such as interstate highways but inherently part of the marketing exchange transaction.
So all transactions will no longer fund directly from the merchant to a customer but will flow from a merchant through the government to a customer and the other way as well. So that’s a very different sort of environment that raises concerns about or prospects I should say of regulation and also the role of the government in everyday transactions will be likely much, much more powerful and apparent.
So in summary, I’m proposing that by the year 2030 the world in many ways will look much different than it does today. And that these new offerings, such as the centralized digital currency, development of human robots, the perhaps driverless cars, perhaps chips in our brain and all this amazing technologies will alter what we do and how we relate to the offerings that we buy and sell on a daily basis. So as we saw, much of what we think we know today will be of much less use in the future.
So we go back to the beginning of this presentation, we talked about this common scenario that many of us are involved in, we own an automobile that we take to work to earn a salary to pay for the car. Oh, that’s probably going to be very, very different. You know, we won’t own the automobile, we will be rideshared. We may not go to work or may go to work for just a few hours as our humanoid robot may be doing these tasks for us and the money that we earned goes likely to be centralized and observed and maybe controlled by the government. And we talked about already, brands may be less important. The government takes on more importance, so this is a very, very different environment.
So how do we prepare for this? Well, I think we have to think about, keep an eye on these changes. I’d encourage everybody to not just keep up with, you know, the world of marketing but also the world of technology, so sources, like you know, Wired magazine, MIT Technology Review. Those are good sources to keep abreast of what is happening today. And to think about the application of these technologies may have on how we buy and sell in the future.
Well, that’s what I wanted to share with you today and I hope that something was new there. I’d be interesting in hearing your thoughts about any of these predictions. We’ll see which one of these come true. But even if they don’t all come true, even if just 1 or 2 come true that represents huge changes to the marketing landscape and to our lives as well. I’d love to hear what you think about these changes and any thoughts you may have. Feel free to contact me, my contact information will be made available. And best of luck with your studies. Go Syracuse.
Author:
Aric Rindfleisch
John M. Jones Professor of Marketing, Vernon Zimmerman Faculty Fellow and executive director of Illinois MakerLab, Gies College of Business, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign