Digital Trends Reshaping the Consumer Experience

For us marketers, at the crossroads of our target consumers and changing technology are our brand goals. And on that note, Macala Wright outlines some key technology trends reshaping the consumer experience. She buckets these new trends into four categories in a recent article.  While she's cool about presenting them as an FYI to us marketers, it's pretty clear that if we're not aware of this forthcoming tools and technologies, we could be fast missing out in losing brand SOV with our customers:

• Singularity
• The notion that technologies will one day be smarter than humans; Macala writes, "Once technology surpasses the human capacity to understand the world, our race will enter a new era that we literally cannot imagine because we do not have the brainpower to do so."
• Visual Thinking
• I recently ran across a new site called "Pearltrees" which promises to organize your saved bookmarks into trees - for your own saving or to share and work on with others. This should be a must have tool going forward for online shoppers, moms, teens, everyone who doesn't need a list of bookmarks in their browser, but rather a visual diagram schemata of them that can be shared and worked on with others
• On this note, I still to this day do not know why Apple does not easily allow users to save or bucket text messages into folders for safe keeping. (I've said this for years product managers; 2009 in fact.)
• Aesthetics
• Is a day coming when brands will appeal to the consumers of the future who will have no recollection of life without the internet, who will not distinguish between the real and digital worlds, and who will seek experiences that seamlessly integrate the online and the offline? It's already underway. Wright shares that if your brand is not already thinking of the future this way, the competition could wipe you out and soon. 
• Calm Technology
• Refers to applications that cut down on the digital noise of high-volume data to show the user only enough information so that he or she is able to focus on a task. The example here is Facebook. If you have your brand content, offers or visuals going too fast on your Timeline, status updates or on your site - the user/consumer will abandon you
• Neuromarketing
• The ultimate goal of neuromarketing is to blow consumer minds with products they deeply desire, thus driving their purchases. We're talking intensive personalization when a user visits a site. Are you looking into this yet? Time to pay a visit to Amazon.com