Have you found yourself, as I have, buying e-books and digital music on your smartphone or tablet that you might not have purchased were you in-store instead of on-screen?
I’ve written before about digital instantaneity, and how today our appetite for information is insatiable, to the point where even instant is not fast enough. Recently Steve Rubel commented on what he calls the stimulation economy, wherein:
“Our rising addiction to digital stimulation is having a profound impact on consumer habits – and, therefore by association, marketers. The technology treadmill is catapulting all of us into a perpetual state of instant gratification. Infotech is like sugar. The more we take in, the more it leaves us with insatiable unfilled cravings.”
It’s the pleasure associated with fast feedback that partly explains our love of gaming, and the escalation of texting and instant messaging. So too do all kinds of eCommerce benefit from the one-click purchase model, since expedited checkouts are well-suited to our fast-paced culture of convenience and consumption. And of course there are many innovations that help consumers to pick up the pace on the path to purchase, like near field technology which will enable smartphone swiping checkouts for even faster in-store checkouts (check out this video example from Starbucks).
From faster brick and mortar purchases to convenient on-sofa shopping, connected mobile devices enable rapid consumption on the fly. Smartphones and tablets are the quintessential example of digital technology supporting and driving the digital stimulation economy. Mobile commerce is perfectly calibrated to a society of infovores seeking data in-hand, and instantly.
Today two news items on my desktop, both about luxury brands launching eCommerce initiatives. What distinguishes luxury fashion brands in the e-shopping space? How to encode “luxe” in the website design, such that the experience of engaging with the page content is consistent with, say, walking into the flagship brick and mortar retail space?
