Page 82 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

Cultural business models on the Internet82ability to provide predictive models (Haguen, C. et al., 2013). These models can help companies both detect the consolidation of certain trends and to characterise and typify other new ones.Although big data technology is revolutionising how companies – especially major corporations with market experience – create value, at the other end of the scale there is another lineof work that chiefly affects startups. Just as well-established companies need to predict new trends, startups that attempt to propose them need a means of corroborating whether their intuitions on future demand for a new business model are correct. And this is where the business world has turned to science, embracing the concept of experimentation. In a complex world with a saturated market, it is important that a new idea be launched with as many guarantees as possible, because if this debut does not prove successful there might not be a second chance. Therefore, once the idea has been hatched, the next step is not to develop a business model but to attempt to test the business idea in order to validate or reject it (Matricano, 2013). Although this idea mainly affects newly created companies owing to the high risk their launch entails, itis also useful to major established corporations that wish to innovate, and therefore skills such as the ability to design, make prototypes, iterate or experiment are increasingly necessary in the business world.Designing memorable experiencesCustomers no longer acquire products or services for their functional value – not evensolely on the basis of price – but incorporate them into their life as part of their life story and, therefore, of their identity through the creation of meaning (Alcoba, J., 2014). In this respect, professionals and organisations must make an effort to generate high quality experiences that provide a response to what their customers want, which are memorable experiencesbased on immersion and participation. These experiences must be generated in many formats that range from purely digital to solely physical, but most will involve the right combination of both worlds. What is more, they must maintain coherence through the different touch points with the customer where they are generated.Organisations must create memorable experiences for their customers based on immersion and participation.An idea of how digital technology has changed the customer’s experience can be found in a sector that is basically physical, automobiles. According to Nissan, a customer’s journeywith a brand used to begin the moment they entered the dealership. Today, however, it begins between six and twelve months before the intention to purchase. What is more, whereasa customer used to make about seven visits to different dealerships, the number has now been reduced to 1.5 (Palmer, A., 2014). Changes are taking place in different sectors in the interac- tion between users and brands as a result of the change in the experience of digital technology assisted purchasing. According to Lithium Technologies, when users request online help, most of them, 66%, expect to receive an answerThe digital competencies of organisations: the challenge of digitally transforming talent