BC Business
Conner Galway of Junction Consulting lays out some digital developments that businesses and brands might want to follow.
“Whenever people find a new technology, they will flock to it, but this will never be a substitute for proper business communication.” Howard Rheingold
Sound familiar?
That quote isn’t about Snapchat or Zoom calls—the hesitancy around advances in business technology dates back to the invention of the telephone. At the time, business leaders were concerned that phones encroached on the “real” way that business was done, which of course involved handshakes, golf courses and smoky board rooms.
Just recently, Merrill Lynch Wealth Management announced that it has effectively outlawed phone calls as a means of reaching out to prospective clients. Instead, young traders are being encouraged to use LinkedIn and to follow up with inbound leads created by the digital marketing department.
If you’ve watched Boiler Room or The Wolf of Wall Street, you’re familiar with what a pivotal role the humble telephone has played in the expansion of the financial services industry. Now those same businesses are starting to turn their backs on the practice that was once responsible for so much of their growth, in favour of a digital-first approach.
To many of us, this revelation feels five to 10 years late, but as someone who spent the early 2010s trying to convince business leaders that websites were here to stay, it’s a reminder of just how far we’ve come in a decade. It’s easy to look at an outdated industry and smugly wonder how they didn’t foresee the inevitable shift and the impact it would have in their businesses. However, the same is probably true for many of us.
Today, we’re in the midst of the greatest shift in consumer behaviour in a generation. The pandemic forced every one of us to do basically everything digitally which sparked online fitness classes, delivery-everything and the string of never-ending Zoom calls.
Lockdowns, and the ways we react to them, are temporary. The question is, what’s going to stay?
Like the Wall Street traders who may never again pick up the very telephones that built their businesses, this summer every company is going to ask itself what it needs to let go and which technology will help it succeed in 2021 and beyond.
Each industry will have its own opportunities, so as a thought starter, we’ve put together five technology trends happening right now. I suggest building your own list of shifts that will impact your marketplace.
Conner Galway is founder and president of Junction Consulting, a Vancouver-based digital-first marketing firm. He publishes a weekly newsletter called The Brief every Monday.