20 Years of Teamspirit – and the 10 year digital adoption rule
By Teamspirit on Tuesday, 5 May 2015
Thinking about 20 years of Teamspirit this week got me thinking about 1995. John Major, CD’s, Jill Dando, The Verve and the Mass Adoption Curve. Banner advertising was a year old and business was awakening to something new arriving in marketing. ‘This Internet thing might catch on – how can we use it for our brand?’ (To paraphrase a typed client memo we had on our office wall at the time).
It did catch on and took about 10 years and one almighty crash in 2000 to get mass adoption. The next decade, starting at the turn of the century, saw the mass adoption of e-commerce, search, video, rich media and online advertising rise, peak and mature.
Halfway through that period, in 2005, social media arrived (with Twitter and Facebook launching either side of 2005) and is roughly maturing now that it is in its mass adoption lifecycle, ten years on. Typically consumers lead and marketers follow. Amazingly even now too many brands still have no coherent social strategy.
Thinking about it, mobile (as a reliable opportunity for marketers to gain an ROI) finally arrived only five years ago in 2010, two or three years after iPhone and Android launched. Marketing data and ‘big data’ arrived around the same time too. As both mobile and big data peak together, we see Marketing Automation as the next major opportunity for brands. Starting? Well, now. And as for the future, in 5 years’ time it will most likely be robotics, the Internet of Things and ‘digital air’ keeping us awake at night.
Technology is squashing the traditional mass adoption bell curve to a shark’s dorsal fin shape (higher, more concentrated adoption). This means businesses, going forward, need to react in the right way to the new opportunities faster and more decisively. Businesses won’t have the luxury of waiting around to see what happens; the ten year cycles identified will become shorter and sharper as the next generation of business leadership excels in change, their customers become super critical and hyper connected and the rate of technology development accelerates further.
