Main Breakfast: Future Mobilities

Recently, we had the pleasure of welcoming professors Anthony Elliott and Sven Kesselring to our Gothenburg office for a breakfast session on "Future Mobilities". Anthony and Sven are running several global research projects on Mobility, Industry 4.0 and AI, and we are proud to be involved in these initiatives.

Here are some reflections and takeaways from a terrific morning discussion:

• The mobility revolution and the digital revolution are intertwined and need to be understood in a broad context. Mobility as such goes beyond the physical movement of people and things, it's also about virtual and imaginative mobility.
• A "connected and mobile life" means that we are technologically and socially connected. For instance, the development and debate around automobilities (ie connected and self-driving vehicles) tends to focus a lot on technology, whilst the actual take-up of these new technologies is heavily dependent on individual attitudes and the readiness of our society as a whole.
• Trust is a key parameter in the equation to get people to embrace and use autonomous cars – and the progress is not linear.
• Smart urbanism is more interesting than smart cities.

What then are the consequences in terms of customer relationships? Here's our two cents based on the breakfast session:

• More and more purchasing decisions are made "on the fly", where the customer (physically, cognitively and emotionally) is "elsewhere". Understanding process (ie the customer journey) will not be enough, we need to focus on context as well.
• We're moving from mobile to mobility. In a near future voice will probably overtake screen as the primary mode of communication. This sheds a new light on concepts like brand management and customer loyalty.
• The content that consumers face will be machine generated (or machine moderated) to a higher extent. But the issue of "high tech and high touch" remains on the table. Human interaction isn't going away, but it's changing.

Want to be participate in future breakfast seminars? Please drop us an email and we'll keep you in the loop regarding future events.