Recently, a Kwik-E-Mart opened around the corner. You know, the one from the imaginary world of The Simpsons?
Of course the clever branding is not lost on me. Still, I'm fascinated that Kwik-E-Mart is a "real" venue—that the Geico Cavemen have their own sitcom and fictitious TV-character blogs are things that real viewers can comment on.
Somewhere between singing along with the intro to a kitschy TV classic to jonesing for our "Crackberry," it has already happened. You don't have to be a Twitter-head or a Second-Lifer to see the melding of your real and virtual experiences into one.
Our consciousness is increasingly occupied by the same mental constructs in both the physical world and the virtual media and communication world we all relate to and connect with. In other words, we are all living in VirtuReality, the experiencing of both the real and virtual at the same time, characterized by the following:
- Non-linear experiencing of time and place in multiple dimensions
- Hyperlocal connecting of physical objects with virtual identities and vice versa
- Digitizing our actions toward understanding the impact of our decisions
Each time you think about a brand, relate to a celebrity as if you "know" them, believe the value of your investments based on "imagined" future earnings, communicate with a screen or a fancy piece of wired plastic, wish you could "undo" or "rewind" a physically real experience, you are in essence merging your mental constructs of meaning into VirtuReality.
The Nonlinear Experiencing of Time
We're all familiar with reruns of episodic television, "retro" fashions and products, pop culture references being more common than historical ones, and bygone eras forever captured on celluloid, vinyl, and now digital music and video. But what happens now that we're all media producers?
The effect of recordable experiences by anyone and everyone seriously puts chronological consciousness in question. Today, TV Land viewers can already transport themselves to the past in two dimensions, so what's the compounded effect of multi-dimensional, multi-sensory experiences widely available?
The proliferation of Lifecaching, along with technologies like Brain-to-Computer UIs, geotagged innovations like Photosynth, essentially change how we experience any given time and space through input from everyone. As long as an experience has a recorded reference point, the reality of being able to transport yourself with any time and space known to anyone is soon becoming a readily available reality.
Even before that happens, just consider our use of hyperlinks now. Isn't a link both the past (produced earlier) and the future (outcome dependent on your decision to click or not click) to arrive at the present?
The Hyper-Connecting of Our Physical Reality
Bruce Sterling's visionary article in a recent issue of Wired is not that far from the reality now being cultivated. As more physical locations are referenced with data points such a Google Earth and related mapping mash-ups, the real and virtual increasingly coexist on the same conscious plane.
RFID and smart dust-tagged objects are no longer science fiction but factual matters of efficiency from enterprise to households. When things in the physical world have virtual counterparts and vice versa, the mental and physical constructs not only interrelate but become interdependent on each other.
For example, in a hyperlocal world, your decision to buy something or patronize a restaurant might very well be dependent on the "vibe" you sense from multitude of geotagged reviews for that particular physical entity. Just as our natural ecosystem negotiates supply and demand to maintain homeostasis, a world with connected spaces and objects represent the same for the market ecosystem. That brings us to next emerging phenomenon.
Understanding the Measurable Impact of Our Decisions
Both real and virtual real-time information connected to points of reference, lets us better understand the impact of our decisions. We are actually living through that right now.
We can check our account balances on the mobile, monitor the response to our creative output on social networks, buy services like Airfare based on real-time supply and demand, and even our carbon footprint at each purchase point. And that's only the beginning.
Soon, the idea of advertising becomes replaced by the idea of recommendations by someone whose agenda you can verify by a multitude of measurable factors. Advertisers can no longer say one thing and do something else. That's over. It's over because the next generation of collective decision making tools like Vosnap, Digg, Rapleaf and Attap's Riffs can instantly tell us whether or not it's true.
Marketing 3.0: Innovating Ahead of Change
A digitized, virtualized physical world not bound to a fixed timeline consciousness, and with the ability for individuals to make intelligent networked decisions, throws more than a few currently accepted marketing paradigms out of whack.
Concepts like "segmenting" and "targeting" become nearly impossible with exponentially increasing variables of intersecting timeline, location, mood, intent, and more... compounding the difficulty of executing on previously acceptable marketing thinking. While some symptomatic fixes focus on more clever ways of trying to hold on to what used to work, the adaptive approach may be to rethink what's really next.
First, in a VirtuReal world, there is no online or offline. There are no real distinctions between business model, brand, or competitive strategy. There are only connections and meaning. Human nature and the nature of systemic connection design are the only constants.
In a VirtuReal world, thoughts are the ultimate drivers of reality. Imagine how our thoughts (virtual) equal actions (real), and then translate that into a collective thought effecting collective action for real time supply and demand. In other words, how we collectively "feel" about something now becomes more important than ever to determine whether or not that "something" survives in our market ecosystem.
