Late last year, Sabre hosted a webinar on Tnooz to provide thoughts on how the digital landscape is evolving — as well as a few key trends that are influencing that evolution.
As I mentioned on the webinar, I know many have probably heard more than their fill of presentations regarding big data, mobile, social, merchandising and media — so we opted to take a slightly different angle.
NB: This is a report by Sean Arena, chief commercial director for online and emerging business at Sabre.
If we look at the core of what’s driving many noteworthy innovations as of late, there are really three primary areas that consistently come to mind: content, context and convenience.
Content creation is growing exponentially, with countless contributors. Blogs, photos, promotions, listings — you name it.
This is evidenced by one commonly cited statistic — over 90% of all the data in the world has been generated in the last two years — and that factoid is slightly dated.
So, as more and more content is created, more context is needed to allow the user to see information most relevant to them.
Technologies and tools, data models and data labels – tags, reviews, preferences – search engines, social graphs, knowledge graphs — they are all designed to improve our ability to assimilate and associate information.
People are able to absorb information much faster and make more informed decisions, but that doesn’t magically happen.
Paramount to this is how easily and intuitively information can be accessed, presented and consumed. In other words, it also has to be convenient to win mindshare.
Whether it is a matter of having a faster workflow, ease or ubiquity of access and transactability, or just a better general user experience, they all drive value.
We are currently witnessing a three-way collision between search, social and retail — and it’s a beautiful (albeit chaotic) thing.
We now live in a world where search spans well beyond a list of website links, where social is more than a simple news feed, and retail is no longer a siloed storefront. The lines are blurring, but with this ambiguity comes opportunity.
So let’s take content. Who generates content and what are some key trends in this area? Well, examples of common creation sources are:
- Suppliers – Continuously bundling, unbundling, adding new products and services
- Consumers – Contributing and sharing opinions, research or experiences
- Intermediaries – For example retailers — creating unique and expansive choices, packaging, cross-selling and upselling
- Developers – Through mash-ups and OpenSource platforms, they often content creators themselves
Where do you go to find trip ideas? Where do you go to find a recipe? Where do you compare electronics? Choices aren’t narrowing, and chances are they are not sought where you once looked five years ago.
Simply marveling at all of the new ways in which content is created, or the vast amounts of it amassing daily, is of little value without parallel advancements in context.
It’s not just about aggregation, but contextualization. Several areas contribute to providing greater relevance, but let’s take a look at a few key examples:
- Recommendations – Whether professional, personal or artificially driven through data, they continue to play a key role in refining one’s perspective — adding a powerful weighted dimension to content.
- Awareness – Where you are, what you’re doing, what device you are using, or what stage you are in within any given process clearly can change the nature of how content is viewed or used.
- Associations – Or, put another way, the ability to identify relevant interrelationships within content. It’s no new concept, but with continuing advancements in data storage, modeling and analytics, it is driving new value in suggested selling and identifying untapped market opportunities.
- Preferences – Whether stated or observed, there are no shortage of uses in how user preferences and priorities continue to drive innovative ways to deliver greater context.
So, if the ever growing complexity and amount of content drives the need for greater context, and significant advancements in context drives greater clarity, users will continue to demand more convenient methods of accessing and consuming contextually relevant information.
Convenience is an intrinsic value. We don’t always know it when we see it, but we often see it when it’s missing.
- Channel – Mobile, tablet, phablet, desktop, laptop, wristop, offline, online — each attract certain users with certain use cases. In this multi-device, multi-channel world, continuity is playing an increasingly critical role.
- Security – Advancements continue to make access, authentication and transactability an easier experience.
- Payment – Micro-purchases, virtual wallets, one-click checkouts, merchant-in-a-box, they are all examples of creating a more efficient buying process.
- Presentation – The user experience has finally taken a giant leap to its rightful place — in front of all product and business decisions. Adaptive design, predictive interactions, gesture-based commands are no longer nice-to-haves, they are fundamental components of a today’s most common applications.
As you make decisions in how your business will operate in tomorrow’s digital economy, think about the role that each of these variables will or should play in shaping your future.
- How will you create, curate, aggregate, disaggregate, save and share content? What will be commoditized, what will differentiate, and where do you fit in the content equation?
- How will you improve content relevancy for your customers and for your business? How will you automate, personalize and scale context to drive value?
- How will you simplify lives? How will you make content consumption a unique, yet consistently enjoyable experience?
Hope you are ready to build applications that move the world...
NB: This is a report by Sean Arena, chief commercial director for online and emerging business at Sabre. It appears here as part of Tnooz's sponsored content initiative.
NB2: Our Tnooz-Sabre webinar from Thursday 29 May: Reinvent travel by collaborating and using new tools
NB3: Move earth technology and trip ideas images via Shutterstock.