We are in the dawn of a new digital era led by emerging technologies, where today’s marketers are facing a decline in budgets paired with an urgency to drive more sales and growth, resulting in the overwhelming need to do more with less. Everyone is drumming the same song: we can do it faster, we can do it cheaper, we can help you become more efficient! And it makes sense; it’s scary out there, and the first reaction is to cocoon yourself until the storm has passed.
“Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass, it's about learning how to dance in the rain” - Vivian Greene
And that’s the thing; these forces are reshaping how teams work and setting the stage for a new breed of agency to emerge. But the solution is not an agency that can deliver the same stuff but cheaper and faster; we can do that, that’s easy. But what brands get from this is just the market standard, the bare minimum to stay competitive and just survive.
What Apple did with the Vision Pro launch is the perfect example, they didn’t just create another VR/AR headset and use AI to cut corners and ship faster and cheaper. They redefined the market and created a new industry Spatial Computing, by using emerging technologies to create something better and not just go faster and cheaper.
For websites is the same; when your website is one prompt away, survival doesn’t seem that likely anymore. And by surviving, you are just becoming invisible and with an already shrinking market, customers won’t even notice you and your pipeline will crash. We’ve seen this many times.
We all got comfortable, I get it! The market was so easy to navigate, over a decade of stability and prosperity made that. Startups were getting overfunded and hiring like there was no tomorrow! The focus was on operations, leaving innovation in a second stage. Websites started to become more and more a utility to look professional and trustworthy, and let the customers flow into your offering.
“Solution driven websites are not cutting it anymore. It’s all about the feeling you get when engaging with a brand. It’s not pragmatic, it’s emotional.” - Stefanie Zakour, Co-Founder at Refokus
Things changed, these new technologies are allowing people to do more with less, a single person is already able to create amazing stuff that a few years ago would have been considered groundbreaking. And it will change even more in the next couple of months (yeah, not years). There is a continued increase to raise the bar in brand expression and customer engagement. In other words, it’s all about building connections with customers. It’s the second wave of emotional design taking place.
It doesn’t matter how good your campaigns run, if they are not supported by breathtaking visuals it’s like throwing wood to a tiny fire (it will not make the fire bigger, in case you didn’t know). If you want to win in this new digital era, you need to harness the power of emerging technologies to create better experiences, build stronger connections with customers, push boundaries, and innovate. And all of that while increasing the campaigns you run.
But it’s not all about emerging technologies, it’s not all about AI or the ones we just forgot about like AR, VR or whatever two letters you want to put together to spice things up. It’s about having an appetite for innovation as an ongoing thinking that runs through the whole organization. And that’s where a new breed of agency makes sense, one empowering brands to harness their full potential by combining design, innovation and forward-thinking. Because without fear the potential for growth is unlimited. It’s time to reimagine everything we know, it’s time to reshape everything we do, it’s time to Refokus.
