Emerging social and consumer trends

Emerging technology trends have reshaped consumer expectations and behavior in the market place. Companies come up with disruptive business models to satisfy the demands of the consumers. Social media has reshaped the way consumers interact and has forced companies to include social media as a part of their strategy planning process. Hence I feel that companies must constantly evaluate their business models and assess the impact of technologies and enable their applications/infrastructure to support these emerging consumer and social trends.

There is a common trend emerging in all kinds of businesses; irrespective of whether they are consumer oriented or non-consumer oriented. These trends are emergence of social media, consumer expectations for instant availability and new pricing models.

Social media has almost changed the way the consumer and the firms interact. The firms can no longer target individuals. The concept of community driven marketing shapes their marketing strategy. Data insights gathered from community websites such as Facebook are invaluable. Hence firms must strongly integrate social media into their strategy planning.

Apple computers are an example of increasing instant availability demands of consumers. Apple laptop starts instantly when opened unlike Sony or other laptops. Consumers want the laptop to start immediately and reduce the boot up time. Tablets have encouraged consumers to stay connected even when they are on the move. These features have significantly shaped consumer demand of the products. Hence firms must constantly evaluate its product features and incorporate them to retain and attract more customers.

Consumers are increasingly expecting good deals for any purchase and want to extract the maximum value for the price they pay for the product. When firms offer more “free” items consumers tend to get attracted towards those products. Skype is one of the examples for these free disruptive pricing models. Skype does not charge for any incoming calls and enables users to make skype – to – skype calls free of charge. Their revenue comes from advertisers and outgoing calls to any cell or land line numbers. Hence “freemium” business model has emerged as a strong force. These disruptive pricing models can be traced back to App store approach. Apple’s way of selling individual music tracks rather than complete albums for a very low price was hugely successful. App store approach was then copied by many companies such as Nokia’s OVI store. These trends point out a fact that consumers are increasingly expecting digitally delivered services and at a price that offers maximum value to their money.

Hence CEOs should constantly be aware of these consumer and social emerging trends while shaping their firm’s growth strategy.