Driving Digital Value
10 July 2009
Last week I attended Intellect's Consumer Electronics Conference themed Driving Digital Value. The conference is an annual event where manufacturers, retailers, broadcasters, government and media stakeholders attend to listen about the challenges and opportunities companies see ahead of them.
Whilst much of it was about new products and business plans a couple speakers did talk specifically about the consumer experience in the Digital World and it wasn't based on the experience of digital natives but of the general populace. So what did they say?
Helen Keppel-Compton is the Head of Buying of Consumer Electronics at John Lewis and said that the consumer electronics market is the most challenging product area she has worked in in her twenty year career. And provided the following example: starting in 1984 when consumers purchased Bruce Springsteen's ‘Born in the USA' on vinyl and took us through the cassette and CD purchasing era to the rise of the music download market and ownership of ipods in 2005. During this time Helen pointed out that people continued to purchase jeans without any problems, but technology changed rapidly without people instinctively understand it.
To overcome consumer confusion Helen thinks that electronic products need to do be simplified, and not be electronic Swiss Army knives. If a person is purchasing a digital camera it should be a digital camera and not have a video editing suite incorporated as well. Her ideal piece of equipment would be one remote that had one button, which did everything - perhaps a little wishful?
Dave Tansley, a Partner at Deloitte, talked about how consumers are becoming more demanding and fragmented in their views and that whilst consumers will be price conscious they will also be value driven, i.e. does the product meet their green expectations? And whilst the benefits consumers get from the digital market are: choice, immediacy, convenience and personalisation. The challenges consumers face are choice (too much), immediacy (slooooow downloads), convenience (services are inaccessible for some users) and personalisation (who owns your personal information?).
All of this points to the need for industry to make their products simple to use and for consumers to be empowered so that they can get the full benefits of using them. This reflects much of what the Panel has been saying in the current debate about how to expand digital participation.