Customer 4.0 - Part 2

HERE COMES THE SECOND PART OF THE "Customer 4.0" article that was published in berlin Valley News.

Trend #5 - Content is King

With today's Internet infrastructure, rich media formats and the changes in the Google search algorithm, digital content is experiencing a major renaissance. For companies and marketing professionals, advertising without content marketing has become unthinkable. Social media plays a central role in the marketing of digital content. Traditional content channels (TV, radio, print) are being replaced by digital content platforms such as Buzzfeed, Heftig.co, Onedio, Netflix, The Whistle Sports Network.

The Whistle Sports Network is transforming the entire American sports coverage with attractive user-generated content. With a focus on the high-volume Millenials, The Whistle Sports Network distributes more than 3 billion video views to Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine and Google Plus. The same development can be seen at the user-generated content platform Motor-Talk in Berlin, which delivers a head-to-head race with the digital car BILD. Since 2015, the user-generated content platform Buzzfeed has more reach to the target group 18-34 years in the USA than the traditional channel CBS.

Trend #6 - Smart Data

Big data has been a taboo word in recent years. This is because as of today only one ¼ of all digital data is accessible for analysis purposes; only 3% of this data has been tagged. In the future, companies will have to deal with two topics: 1 Who will own the data (e.g. Access Authorization) in the future? 2 How can data be monetized or made actionable (e.g. business model)?

In contrast to European VCs, American investors see great potential in the renewal of global service providers (e.g. McKinsey, Accenture, Alix etc.) through data know-how and technology. Peter Thiel and all well-known US venture capitalists financed the consulting firm Palantir from Palo Alto, which today employs the best 2,900 data scientists in America and this year could break through the U$ sales billion. The somewhat smaller counterpart in Europe and China is located in Berlin and is called TD. Dataminr from New York has set itself the task of focusing on real-time actionable data. Dataminr is the only company in the world with full access to the Twitter data stream and analyses anomalies in real-time to deliver predictive real-time news to governments, media companies, financial institutions and more.

Trend #7 - Digital Health

Healthy well-being and life-prolonging measures are the major trends of the 21st century. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin alone have provided more than U$ 1 billion in capital to investigate the causes of the aging process. The dynamic development of digital health is reflected in the boom in wearables (Apple Watch, Fitbit, Jawboone etc.), the first mobile food analysis devices (e.g. Vessel) and the continuing growth of functional food. Functional food companies, such as The Honest Company by US actress Jessica Alba or Aloha by Brands-4-Friends founder Constantin Bisanz, have been proven to produce measurable, healthier products. The measurability of personal health data and habits, whose mobile analysis and derivation result in life-prolonging measures (e.g. eGym, functional food etc.), gives all health systems a new, digital dimension. This new dimension must be filled in the future by innovative business models.

Trend #8 - Infrastructure Free-Ride

Successful Internet companies are often characterised by the intelligent use of an existing infrastructure with little capital commitment and regulation. Google, Skype, WhatsApp etc. use the infrastructure of the large telecommunications companies. European banks see their infrastructure as a barrier to market entry. In recent years, on the other hand, some 200 FinTech growth companies have been founded in Germany alone. Many of these agile companies (e.g. iwoca, Keditech, number26 etc.) use the existing infrastructure of the banks without having to bear the costs. The Berlin-based FinTech company barzahlen.de enables cash payments of online and offline invoices as well as cash withdrawals to approx. 9,000 point of sales (POS) of large retail chains (DM, REWE, PENNY etc.) throughout Germany. This means that barzahlen.de has 3 times as many "branches" in Germany as Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank combined! An extremely intelligent way to monetize the existing infrastructure of the German retail trade.

Part 2 of Stefan Heilmann's article was published first at Berlin Valley News (German)