THE DIGITAL EXPERIENCE NOW AFFIRMS ITSELF AS THE NEW DRIVER FOR VALUE CREATION
The 4 great eras of value creation
Looking back over 10,000 years of trade between humans:
8000 years BC, the men and women who were only just getting to grips with subsistence farming and becoming self-sufficient, came up with idea of exchanging goods produced: my goat for your cereal crops; your milk for my flints.
This first era of trade was marked by the keyword “production”,
which formed the roots of value creation for several thousands of years.
Trade and products became more sophisticated over time and we entered the era of 2 major industrial revolutions in which value creation became centred in goods (that can be defined as “sophisticated commodities”) and the winner was the person who produced these goods the cheapest.
2 centuries later, these goods became commodities again with all players producing similar goods in all aspects, and the value creation driver became stuck. . In the same way that commodities went through a sophistication phase, goods also needed to become more sophisticated to continue to generate value.
A sophisticated good is a customised good and thus becomes a service.
The service economy was born in the middle of the 20th century, and the successful businesses were those who worked out that the key to succeeding in the service economy was quality.
This era generated value for over 50 years.
Following on from commodities, then goods, the services themselves started to become standardised and seen as commodities. A new value creation axiom was needed. Just as it had in the 3 previous eras, the solution entailed the customisation and sophistication of the previous axiom: a customised service is a personalised service which creates an experience.
At the end of the 1990s, leading business schools reintroduced the following marketing principle: “if something is free, it has no value ». Less than 20 years later, the tables have completely turned. Now, free services have supplanted sold services.
When the French telecommunications company Free turned the French telecoms market on its head by introducing a package at €2 per month, it acknowledged that the services themselves had become standardised and that the value would be provided in a different form.
When Nespresso sponsors the purchase of a potentially free coffee machine because the business model is based on the sale of coffee pods and the experience created by offering guests a “nespresso”, it places experience as a core value.
When Google provides a free search engine (of which the design, technical excellence and maintenance are anything but free) to billions of humans every day with the aim of capturing data to sell, it produces an experience to create value.
When Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks, defines his model as “the third place in our daily lives”, he is referring to creating value through experience and is not talking about the product. In fact, what creates value for Starbucks today and what enables the brand to sell coffee to go in a paper cup for the same price as an espresso on Avenue Montaigne in Paris, is not the quality of the product, but the experience: free wifi, leather armchairs, the option to use the space as a work space for the day, etc.
And so ten years ago, we firmly planted ourselves in the 4th era of trade value creation, the era of creating value through experience.
What is Digital Experience?
Existing alongside the advent of experience, digital technology entered our lives and changed the rules. In under 10 years, digital technology has become our greatest ally and the most effective growth driver. The Digital Experience has enabled industries to consolidate and enrich the physical experience
The key factors of success of the Digital Experience
Digital Experience is not a situation. It is a new concrete business model incorporating multiple aspects to form a whole that impact all interaction between the company and its clients and customers.
Based on our experience and our work with our clients and customers, we have defined 6 key market areas:
Digital Organisation: The digitalisation of business processes, change management, digital integration and the capacity of an organisation to drive innovation.
Digital Business: the financial performance initiative behind value creation, which using digital technology promotes: Digital Strategy, the creation of a new Business Model and Business Plan.
Digital Marketing: operational levers used to win customers, focusing on the three key areas of Acquisition, Conversion and Customer Loyalty.
Customer Experience: the use of digital technologies and all phygital channels to continually adapt and optimise the journeys and services offered to customers.
Smart Data: the valorisation and exploitation of customer data, new Data Visualisation technologies, used to optimise the design of products and services offered to customers and to permanently improve the Next Best Action offered.
Digital Factory: a work method that combines methods, processes, tools, human resources and management, enabling companies to speed up their time to market by producing services and digital journeys more rapidly and more effectively.
The Digital Experience can therefore be defined as a set of technology tools and business processes created by companies to facilitate, enrich and accelerate the Experience perceived by their customers within their communication.
Viewed in this way, Digital Experience constitutes an exceptional opportunity that companies need to seize in order to boost and shake up their growth strategies.
