marketingmag.com.au30 CONTENT PARTNER: FORRESTER
MARKETING 2019ver the past two decades, Forrester has
surveyed millions of consumers in
20 countries and we have tracked the
most important changes in consumer
technology adoption and use. The data
makes it clear that while companies have spent the last two
decades building their tech stack to run their businesses,
consumers, too, have been building their own consumer
tech stacks. Where companies’ tech stacks can seem shaky,
consumers’ tech stacks are firmly grounded and rising
higher each day. This is the marketer’s dilemma: you have
to build your tech stack fast enough, sure enough, to serve
today’s consumers through the powerful tools and services
in which they are confident. Most importantly, it’s not just
about understanding how many people have a smartphone,
a wearable or a smart device in their homes. It’s about
understanding how those technologies enable new modes
of consumer experience and ultimately shape the kinds of
conversations you can have with your customers (answer:
far richer, more continuous than ever before).
To understand this, we took a much deeper look. We
went beneath the tech itself to the fundamental aspects
of human experience to see if we could understand why
some technologies thrive while others struggle to get off the
ground, and some never take flight at all. The deeper look
revealed a fundamental model of human experience based
on evolution. We grouped humanity’s uniquely evolved
characteristics into four groups – tools, coordination,
conversation and emotion – four forces of technology
adoption and use, which we then described with our data.
The result is clear: we have moved from people who
occasionally used technology in these realms of our
experience, to people who now use technology tools
constantly, applying tech to every aspect of who we are,
how we converse, what we do and what we care about.
That’s the consumer’s tech stack: a set of personally selectedReineke Reitsma
is VP and research
director at Forrester.James L McQuivey
is VP and principal analyst
at Forrester.The consumer
tech stack
Brands aren’t the only ones building out
their tech stacks. James L McQuivey
and Reineke Reitsma outline the four
forces that drive consumers’ tech stacks
in Australia.
technologies that extend our ability to do all the things
we evolved to do. And do so in such a way that we feel
motivated to come back to those technology tools more
often with higher expectations. In Australia, these four
forces manifest themselves in the same way as globally, but
through diff erent platforms or technologies.
Let’s see how these four forces drive Australians’
technology behaviours...TOOLS: WHAT MAKES OUR WORLD
USEFUL TO US
Think about the phone you use, the car you drive, how
you tailor them to your needs, how you personalise them- and how you would feel if you no longer had access
to them. Tools are not just a way of getting things done;
they help you express yourself. The mobile phone is the
fi rst tool in history that the majority of people carry with
them everywhere, serving as a completely personalised
and immediately responsive extension of their will. In
Australia, 85 percent of Australian online adults use a
smartphone, enabling them to engage in conversation,
coordinate tasks and fulfi ll emotional expectations,
wherever they are. Wearable devices have evolved to be
part of this multitool experience, hitting critical mass in
2018: 32 percent of Australian online adults use at least one
wearable device. The smart home is at a similar turning
point: 35 percent of Australian online adults use a smart
TV, eight percent use a voice assistant speaker and 13
percent use smart home devices like internet-connected
thermostats or home audio systems.
CONVERSATION: HOW WE CONNECT
WITH EACH OTHER
Conversations make all of modern life possible.
Specifi cally, our species’ capacity for language enabled our
capacity for sociality, which further enabled our capacity