As Salesforce‘s resident futurist, it’s Peter Schwartz‘s job to review an immense pile of research and data to help guide the company forward, predicting how social and economic shifts will effect business in the years to come.
Futurism has been Schwartz’s gig since the seventies, when he developed his own method of scenario planning at the Stanford Research Institute. This led to a string of books on scenario planning, society and the future, including The Art of the Long View, Inevitable Surprises, The Long Boom and China’s Futures.
Marketing asked Schwartz for his take on the state of mobile, the transfer of power from companies to consumers and where marketers will get their insights from in the future.
You’ve said before that smartphones were the catalyst to “end the digital divide.” What effects do you see mobile having on the way products are made and sold as we move towards 100% adoption?
Because most data will be in the cloud, and more and more bandwidth will be more widely available, most hardware will be fairly commoditized and cheap, with a few exceptions of a few mobile players with enough cachet to get a premium. And clever start-ups (e.g. Pebble) might as well.
You’ve also said smartphones are leading us towards the “global village” Marshall McLuhan predicted. What do you imagine the global village will look like in, say, 25 years?
By the global village, McLuhan meant that condition of mutual knowledge, awareness and a tendency toward shared values that modern media enables. Social media lets everyone affect everyone else. The great risk will be homogenization of cultures. Every shopping mall on the planet is already nearly identical whether it is in New York, Beijing or Cape Town. But human diversity will still find a great variety of expressions despite the power of ubiquitous homogenization. Art, music, politics and more will all be centers of growing diversity.
What other effects are smartphones having on business that are underplayed or less considered?
The greatest impact of the smart phone is the 24 hour work day and seven day work week. We are always connected, always available. Speed is the new reality and instantaneous response a new necessity. Customers today have completely different expectations around how they want to engage with companies – and how quickly they expect a response.
The “soft” sciences are becoming “harder.” For example, studies in sociology now have enough data to make statements about the social world with a great amount of confidence. Do you see this happening in the marketing world as well?
Marketing is the business expression of the behavioral sciences. It is based on an ever deeper understanding of human behavior. The clearest examples will emerge from neurobiology as we come to understand the biological roots of human behavior.
Salesforce talks a lot about the customer-led economy. What social/political/economic factors led to a world in which consumers have so much power?
In the post World War II era, the combination of the wartime experience of military hierarchy and the relative difficulty and cost of communication led to large hierarchical business organizations. But now that communication is cheap, easy and ubiquitous. And a new generation’s view of hierarchy that has been shaped by the loss of respect for central power means that individuals have the tools of power and the old order is hardly defended. We are now in a customer-centric economy and successful companies must transform the way they connect with customers.
