Since the beginning it’s been disruptive: with its birth, auto has forced to rethink business models and has brought innovation, with other industries committed to identify and implement these very incentives in their own ecosystem. Years of pulling in a more and more fast-moving economy, where the automotive section has got used not to look beyond its borders to understand the future of business, drawing it on its own.
But is it still like it? Fashion, food, living, different industries that followed their own journeys and were able to step forward getting closer to costumers and translating this relation into a profit increase. Because, if it’s true that every business is different, it’s also true that the customer it refers to it’s the same, so as the effect of people and the potentiality of tools offered by technology.
At the end innovating means remixing, knowing how to deal with an age of great changes, as the current one, also thanks to cross-industry contaminations.
And so the focus moves always more on brand – no matter the context it’s in – and on the way in which it builds and fosters its relation with customers. If it’s true that, as the 1999 Cluetrain Manifesto incipit stated, markets are conversations, today more than ever it’s important to focus on what and how it’s communicated: an emotionally engaging and coherent brand experience in each of its expression, without distinctions between physical and digital dimensions. Therefore, which are the watchwords for the future? A caring dimension, authenticity and ability to evolve, according to a 2017 survey submitted to the Brandy participants community.
The physical store doesn’t end up being weakened by this approach, on the contrary it can benefit from it provided that it can manage to reinvent itself: not a place aimed at short term sales goals, but rather a part of the relation journey useful to build a strong customer loyalty, true key for long term profits.
A challenging but at the same time exciting future, in which automotive can go back to be the reference point.
