Page 55 - The Fourth Industrial Revolution

adjustment and refinement while ensuring that the human dimension of the

interaction remains at the heart of the process.

It is the ability to tap into multiple sources of data – from personal to
industrial, from lifestyle to behavioural – that offers granular insights into
the customer’s purchasing journey that would have been inconceivable until
recently. Today, data and metrics deliver in quasi-real time critical insights
into customer needs and behaviours that drive marketing and sales

decisions.

This trend of digitization is currently towards more transparency, meaning
more data in the supply chain, more data at the fingertips of consumers and
hence more peer-to-peer comparisons on the performance of products that
shift power to consumers. As an example, price-comparison websites make

it easy to compare prices, the quality of service, and the performance of the
product. In a mouse click or finger swipe, consumers instantaneously move
away from one brand, service or digital retailer to the next. Companies are
no longer able to shirk accountability for poor performance. Brand equity is
a prize hard won and easily lost. This will only be amplified in a more

transparent world.

To a large extent, the millennial generation is setting consumer trends. We
now live in an on-demand world where 30 billion WhatsApp messages are
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sent every day and where 87% of young people in the US say their smart
phone never leaves their side and 44% use their camera function daily. 33

This is a world which is much more about peer-to-peer sharing and user-
generated content. It is a world of the now: a real-time world where traffic
directions are instantly provided and groceries are delivered directly to
your door. This “now world” requires companies to respond in real time

wherever they are or their customers or clients may be.

It would be a mistake to assume that this is confined to high-income

economies. Take online shopping in China. On 11 November 2015, dubbed
Singles Day by the Alibaba Group, the e-commerce service handled more
than $14 billion of online transactions, with 68% of sales through mobile
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devices. Another example is sub-Saharan Africa, which is the fastest-
growing region in terms of mobile-phone subscriptions, demonstrating how
mobile internet is leapfrogging fixed-line access. GSM Association expects
an additional 240 million mobile internet users in sub-Saharan Africa over

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