An advertisement from 1888 of the first Kodak camera
We are used to constant technological change improving our lives. Many changes have to do with increased speed – railroads and then cars taking over from horses and human feet is the classic example. Many have to do with increased efficiency and thus reduced cost as well, such as movable type and then the printing press taking over from monks with quill pens, or photography taking over from portrait painting in the mid 19th century, then Eastman Kodak’s camera and film letting anyone make pictures.
But only in the late 20th century have we seen the birth of an entirely new category of change – that of making things instantaneous. The telephone, enabling instant communication at a distance, transformed society above and beyond gradual improvements that had made mail faster and more reliable. Polaroid, cutting out to nothing the time lag between shooting and viewing, then digital photography cutting the cost down to nothing, cellphone cameras making it all ubiquitous and flickr and YouTube allowing for instant sharing combine to transform society far beyond the way that photography originally did. So do wikis, blogs and activity streams change the meaning of publishing beyond recognition (a change that the news print industry is feeling now, and the book industry does not yet realize is coming its way).
In short, the relatively recent (in historic terms) development of instantaneity, makes it hard for us to look at it with the required perspective and fully appreciate its qualitative effects. We don’t recognize it easily as it invades yet another aspect of our lives, and most of us fail to grasp the opportunities that arrive in its wake, as old practices are transformed beyond recognition.
It is time I got to the point and connected all of this to marketing, research and HiveSight, so allow me one more example that will get us there. Think of Google as a research tool, compared with a library. Google is instantaneous, both in that it’s always available – just a click away, and in the speed in which it serves you results. You can’t do everything with Google – for some things you still need to go to the library (literally go – drive, park, walk, then back again), but how often do you find yourself doing that, and how does that compare with your frequency of Google queries? For querying Google for information is a form of research just as searching for books in a library is. It’s just that it’s immediacy makes you not give it a second thought – just like the teenager snapping a photo on her mobile, the new cadre of addicts sharing their lives on twitter, or, well, picking up the phone and calling someone (vs. sending a letter). Note that not all of these transformative technological changes are immediately evident to everyone. Phones and Google may be, but using your phone’s camera or twitter are not ubiquitous practices. The latter in particular is something that most people still don’t get.
Now we finally come to another market that I believe is on the verge of being transformed (indeed I have put my carear and life savings behind that belief) – consumer market research. With HiveSight, we set out two years ago to transform that market by making consumer insights instantaneous in the same way that Google search results are. We set out with the realization that traditional methods don’t work very well any longer, but social media allows for a way to read the public consumer mind like never before. We set out to make learning something new about your target market, something that could help you build the products they want and figure out how to reach them, a matter of just a few clicks followed by instant results. We set out to disintermediate market research – placing it right in the hands of its users in marketing departments and ad agencies.
When all of this is true, and to a large extent HiveSight delivers on that promise today, marketing itself is transformed.
