The last couple of years, the number of articles on lifestyle deceases due to high-intensity work-life, financial instability etc., has reached figures no one should even begin to guess. Along with that, more or less every single established media, blog, YouTube edit etc. has provided solutions for how to get an amazing body with a 1-minute work-out, how to lose weight, how to save money, how to make dinner while baking biodynamic bread and mentally stimulating your 1.5 year-old who you won’t let watch TV in 15 min all in 15 minutes etc. etc. etc. This has been a clear indication of a high demand for solutions to making our lives better, so to speak.
I recently pitched a concept to potential client, on how they, through a higher purpose could make the lives of their target group better, by changing their habits. The client was an online grocery store – another indication of that the market for optimizing is very much present, and not only in articles, but as a business.
The last 5-10 years have been focused on bringing people together and sharing your everyday life. But now we are connected, so what’s up next? Using this connectivity to improve our lives. I could here have shifted the focus towards Jaron Laniers latest writings on who owns the future and that the internet killed the middle class, but I won’t. I would though recommend everyone to follow up and read it; not saying I agree with his fears, but it ignites an interesting way of thinking and reflecting, which we all could benefit from.
To me the above gives a clear indication that an age of optimization has begun. Yes, I know it would have been far more in-style to talk about Sharing Economy, but by the end of the day – besides the 5% who actually really do care about the environment every waken hour – Sharing Economy is just a part of the Age of Optimization (AO from now on). Sharing economy makes more or less everything cheaper, which optimizes your expenditure on e.g. housing when travelling, giving you a larger amount to spend on dinners, clothes and drinks. Or it actually makes possible for a large family to travel places, and don’t have to spend a large amount on hotels. In other words, Sharing is just a tool to take advantage of our connectivity and improve our lives in one way or the other.
The last years have also given us a huge palate of possibilities, apps, (digital) media, fashion collections (how many in-season/resort etc. collections can one designer launch?!), gadgets, functionalities etc. – more has been better for many years. It was also seen in websites with a billion subpages, features etc.; everything showing new possibilities in innovation and development. But now, a change is coming. We’ve tried everything and figured out that more is not better. What works is better. What is simple is better. What makes “my” life simple is better.
The next half a decade or more, I believe, will bring along a lot of sorting and discard of stuff that doesn’t provide any value. We will figure out that we do not need as much as possible, and that we can “travel lighter”. Why spend time on apps that only match our life 70%; we want the app best suited for our life, providing us with the best services, saving us as much money and time that we can. Communicating on 7 platforms if 3 do the job? Why spend 15 hours a week grocery shopping, if one can spend 5?
Age of optimization will also and already has in some way affected our way of spending advertising and branding budgets and planning. Every year we are to optimize ROI as much as possible, as well as our knowledge allows. And this task will be more and more focal over the next couple of years. The essence is to look at each activation and see in how many ways it can be documented, on how many media it can be communicated and more importantly, how can it help increase the effect of other activation. But all to the lowest cost possible, which challenges us to find the absolute best mix. What if the most optimal mix is a person and a direct mail, that has been completely personalized based on the shoe you looked at online, or the milk you bough in the supermarket or better yet, online? Wouldn’t that be great? Or better yet, what if the best solution was an app?
I hope and believe that we the next couple of years will see a higher increase in (branded) utilities along with small technological developments such as beacons, providing us with (personalized) tools to optimize our life, as this is where a difference is to be made the next couple of years. It’s a sort of Blue Ocean, if you please.
This will of course bring a lot of useless utilities with it, as many brands (managers) tend to want to follow the latest success that someone else had, and publish something half-finished and rushed in stead of thinking about what their reason-to-be is, and if a utility will make sense in any way, will the purpose of the utility be trustworthy, and if so, make it really good. But not everyone is like that, thank God.
The result of this development, as I see it, will be a completely organized society; a convenience society but an organized one. And wouldn’t that be great – everything organized and nice, just like Tokyo (easy, easy, in some ways, not the entire city). We all spend as little times as possible, save as much money as possible.
This actually sounds a bit scary, and I can help but wonder; when the utility market is fully discovered and used up, then what? What will the next reaction be? Will it be an eruption of the optimized, a desire to make our life a bit less organized? Will everyone live without planning anything or will we just have found a new area where we can optimize? The only area I can come up with is a world where we will get morphed from location to location when travelling. Or that each means to transportation will have its own road, so busses in one level, cars in another, bikes ditto and so on. But then again, what do I know. One can only guess. Any ideas?
Trine Keller-Andreasen 