Leading trends report predicts digital downfall for brands

Digitisation is set to become defunct as people return to their old reliance on physical products and human interaction, according to a new 2018 report.

Design and innovation firm Fjord has released its annual 78-page report, in which it monitors existing business and marketing trends and makes predictions for the future based on customer behaviours.

The company report says that people’s dependence on digital life is drastically waning and brands are no longer enjoying the same level of success by relying on the digitisation of customer services prior to several years ago.

According to the report, this shift is caused by the rise in lower costs of technologies, as well as people’s increasing frustration with screen addiction.

Instead, this is being replaced by a lean towards human interaction and personal experiences.

“[People] are receptive to a more personal approach to services and products,” states the report. “As technology becomes more ambient, they are migrating to services like Airbnb that offer physical, human and sensory experiences that create lasting memories.”

To illustrate this shift to the physical realm, the report highlighted several examples of large-scale digital companies establishing physical operations worldwide, including Amazon, which has acquired a grocery store chain and opened 11 bookstores in the US since 2015.

However, in order to deal with this unexpected change, the report advises not to completely abandon digital technologies but instead reinventing business models to centralise on personal customer experiences while emphasising technologies for other aspects of operations.

The report also mentioned the evolution of artificial intelligence as a major future trend, stating that their functions must not replace that of humans but must operate in synchronised contribution in order to achieve efficiency in a variety of different sectors.

Other trends noted in the report were brands’ increasing reliance on algorithms and the visualisation of digital devices.

Prepared and edited by Arthur Velker.

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