In the beginning of this futurist keynote I told the story of my mother's 100 year old bricks-and-mortar menswear store, Georg Sörman, in Stockholm, Sweden and the challenges that she faces today as she is trying to make sense of the digital customer behaviour that's disrupting her business.
But in this TED-talk I point out that digital disruption is not the reason why my mother's business is struggling. The main reason is that she doesn't like change. When the rate of external change around us in the world trumps the rate of internal change (learning and adaption), our businesses are in deep trouble. And from my experience with mum I know that culture eats strategy for breakfast everyday of the week. In this talk I argue that you have to create a culture of change in order to be ready for the future.
The other point I make in this talk is that the future belongs to those brands that manages to weave together the analogue and digital world - that's where we can add value, in the beautiful sweet spot in the middle where seamlessness truly comes alive. What I mean by this is that we have to move away from business models that have a cold stakeholder or customer focus. In other words, we have to make it hot and intimate and we have to move away from the seams many of us experience.
And it's not just digital startups that have realized the value in this. Burberry's store in London on 121 Regent Street is a great example of a frictionless or seamless customer experience where the analogue and digital worlds converge.