Original article by Brad Howarth, Chief Marketing Officer
What an honour to visit Melbourne and Sydney after such a long time.after my speech Salesforce Retail and Consumer Goods Industry Summit, I met Brad Howarth, my new friend at CMO Magazine. Over the course of an hour, we explored the future of branding, the new role of marketing in organizations in 2030, and of course the emerging world of Web3 (Web 3.0), the next iteration of the web.
Brian Solis: Why Web 3.0 will rewrite the concept of marketing
What if everything you knew about marketing stopped working?A Conversation with Brian Solis of Salesforce
Marketing practices have changed dramatically in recent years as new technologies, channels and processes have rewritten the rules of engagement and delivery. But at its core, many of the key concepts underpinning marketing — gathering audiences, designing and delivering campaigns, and driving conversions — are largely the same as when they were first perfected in the 1950s and 1960s.
However, the world is changing rapidly and is moving in the direction of what may be the next big revolution in digital technology: Web 3.0. This promises to bring together concepts related to identity, trust, decentralization, and immersive virtual environments.
Although the real impact Network 3.0 Unpredictable at the moment, its proponents speak of a decentralized world where control and ownership of data and digital assets belong to individuals, not corporations. If these predictions come true, they will have a profound impact on the relationship between organizations and their customers, redefining customers as community members or stakeholders, and eschewing activities that favor ongoing relationships. This heralds a turbulent period ahead for marketers.
While it’s hard to think about this fundamental change in the day-to-day pressures of running a marketing function, it’s the brainchild of award-winning author, renowned digital anthropologist and futurist Brian Solis. Solis currently works at Salesforce as a Global Innovation Evangelist, tasked with exploring and explaining the impact of digital transformation, innovation and disruption. There are few emerging disruptions bigger than the Web 3.0 threat.
Solis is now concerned that many organizations—especially those born before the digital revolution in the mid-1990s—are still understanding what it means to be a digital enterprise. Even those born into the digital age are themselves adapting to the social nature of the second iteration of the web since the mid-2000s.
“The promise of Web 3.0 is very strong and inevitable,” Solis told Chief Marketing Officer. “The distinction between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 is widening the gap between what businesses need to do in this digital-first era and what they are still doing in the pre-digital era.”
That’s reflected in the way consumers experience e-commerce — a development in the first era of the web — that is largely the same today as it was 20 years ago, he said.
“If you look at the digitalization we’re doing, whether it’s retail or commerce in general, it’s a digitally siloed model of doing what they do at scale with greater efficiency and intelligence,” Solis said. “But it’s firing on a bunch of customers now, for whom it’s not as effective as it used to be.
“It shows that the time for change has really come, because customers are not going backwards.”
Explore new modes
If the promises of Web 3.0 come true, Solis believes it will drive new forms of engagement between organizations and customers based on concepts of engagement and value exchange, rather than one-way commerce.
“This trajectory will create a new level or standard of customer experience,” Solis said. “In this metaverse world, customers will have a more immersive web. The Web 3.0 structure inherently facilitates not only membership, but community.”
Solis believes that the biggest challenge many executives will face will not be a technical challenge, but one posed by their own experience. These may create optimized mindsets and processes for a world that may soon not exist.
“In order to accelerate meaningful business transformation and customer relevance, you have to start at the leadership level and at the level of really questioning your own assumptions about how to do things,” Solis said.
The challenge that emerges is that leaders who believe they are on the right digital path today are just playing catch-up, having spent the past few years modernizing old processes rather than designing new ones.
“Instead of accelerating digital innovation, we accelerated digitization,” Solis said. “We’re digitizing pre-pandemic processes, backed by pre-pandemic organizational models. Many of those models are rooted in the 1950s and 1960s. We haven’t stopped to ask what else we can do.”
innovator or fast follower
The challenge of Web 3.0 is manifested in the fact that with each generation of technology, most of the wealth is created by entirely new entrants – Amazon and eBay are the first iterations of the Web, Facebook and Google are the second. While there were exceptions (Apple was founded in 1976, but then revived with the return of Steve Jobs in 1996), organizations born before each wave only succeeded by becoming fast followers.
Of course, history does not need to repeat itself, and the new giants of the Web 3.0 era have yet to emerge. This means that any organization has an opportunity to take a leadership role – if they start now.
“The ‘digital-first’ model has to be reimagined, and preparations for Web 3.0 have to start now,” Solis said. “There are companies that will continue to digitize existing models. But you now have another group of companies asking different questions.
“You have to go back to basics and see how you connect with customers and then get some pilots to test.”
For Solis, two factors benefit any traditional organization. First, he suggested that the Web 3.9 revolution will not happen overnight, so agile organizations will have the opportunity to learn and adapt. Second, those who have invested in developing a 360-degree view of their customers and organizing their operations to take advantage of this view will find that their investment will be very valuable in the age of Web 3.0.
“If you can understand your customers, you can know what they value and how that value evolves over time and how to organize around value delivery now and over time,” Solis said. “It creates an agile, evolutionary model so when customers start to experience what the full Web 3.0 will allow.
“We’re talking about shifting from consumer to stakeholder.”
control-alt-delete
Ultimately, Solis believes in the transition to Web 3.0 and things like metaverse The reset on behalf of marketers and the organizations that employ them — which he describes as a “control-replace-remove” moment.
“This is a control-replace-delete moment — a moment without a script — that requires imagination and reshaping what it means to be a business in this new world,” Solis said. “If you had to invent the business of 2030, you wouldn’t be looking to the 1950s and 1960s to learn how to sell to these audiences — you would invent it. That’s the opportunity for all of us.
“We’re not going to fix this by trying to adapt yesterday’s model to 2035. Now is the time for leaders to control-replace-delete leadership itself.”
