Recently over the last few years, it's been host to the TEDxSydney events, one of the largest TEDx events in the world, where the latest digital and innovative ideas are, of course, being broadcast.
Specifically today, what I want to address with all of you is the mobilisation of everything. The fact that the consumer and business to business customers, citizens, are increasingly taking life matters into their own hands via their smart devices, their phablets, their tablets, and their smart phones. What this means for brands is that you need to repurpose your brands for an increasingly mobilised future. Increasingly, when people are interacting with a physical space like this, we want to know the history through augmented reality and being able to interact with a real physical infrastructure place like this one in a whole new way. Where we want almost like a digital mobile layer in the way that we interact so that we can get a bit more sense, a little bit more history, and a deeper understanding of the place we happen to be in.
It also pertains to the fact that we want to make smarter decisions as citizens, as consumers, as B2B customers. This is a huge opportunity for brands that I work with. Many of my brands are now making a leap into this mobile future where they're kind of integrating the best of the analog physical space and digital mobile realities.
This is important because, as human beings, when we make decisions in favour or against a brand, in favour of one type of future or against another one, often times as human beings when we listen to our gut instinct, and this flies counter-intuitively in the face of sort of traditional wisdom, we suck at making financial decisions based on gut feel. We are highly irrational as human beings.
For example, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Productivity Commission did some research a few years ago in the context of problem gambling in Australia. What they found is when they asked people, "When you say that you spend $100, what did you actually spend audited?" And when it comes to things like transport, in fact, Australians were pretty good at judging what they spent when they said they spent $100. A hundred dollars equated to an audited amount of transport cost of $104, now just $4 difference. Not so bad.
It gets more troublesome, though, when we say we spent $100 on homeware or clothing, the real audited amount, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, is $132. When it comes to what we spent at the pub last night, darling, $100 equates into $158. When we said we spent $100 at the casino last night, the real audited amount is $735. When, as human beings, we listen to our gut feel in the context of our personal finances, we suck.
Let me give you the counter example to this and what happens when human beings, citizens, people around the world, are mobilising. Let me tell you the story of Raj. He's a fisherman in aquaculture in Kerala, India, a state on the coast of India where aquacultural fishing has been the staple of the economy for many, many generations.
For generations, he and his father and his uncles and his grandparents have gone out to sea, caught the catch of the day and then even though they have a choice of 11 different harbors, they would usually listen to their gut feel and take their catch of the day back to the exactly same harbor that they always took it to. Because it happened to be the harbor that was closest to their families, and they wanted some rupees for their catch of the day, or they wanted to barter for another type of good, even though the 11 different harbors were equal distance from the places that they fished the catch of the day at.
One day, however, Raj, who had for many years the only kind of professional or business development that he would do at the end of the day would be to mend the nets to ensure that no fish got lost, one day picked up a Nokia 1100, the mobile phone that's sold the most units, bar none, around the world. The Nokia 1100, because of Bharti Airtel's coverage up to 25 kilometers away from the shoreline, gave Raj the ability to call all his mates in the 11 different harbors to get a real time commodity pricing update on his catch of the day.
Do you think that Raj started making different decisions about which market he sold his goods into? Absolutely. Over the course of a year, what happened in Kerala was that when the other fishermen saw that this guy had mobilely adopted to a new future, what they decided to do was also to adopt mobile phones as a main way to change their business model and make smarter, more rational, more mobilised decisions about their commodity that they were going to sell into the market.
The economists in the 'Quarterly Journal of Economics' got a hold of this story, and they audited what happened over the course of a year in Kerala, India. What they found is that the net yields amongst the fishermen who had adopted mobile technology went up 8 percent, and the price for the consumer went down 4 percent as a result of mobile adoption and of course for the consumer as a result of less wastage. The fishermen weren't selling too much fish into any one market, but rather there was this beautiful equilibrium between demand and supply.
If you're an economist, what you should be having right now is sort of goosebumps. I mean think about this. What do you use mobile for? What do you use social media for? Yes, we tweet, and maybe we Snapchat, but are you making different business decisions as a result of real time data like these Indian fishermen, or not?
Think about how you can start integrating mobile to make smarter decisions amongst your sales staff, in your marketing, looking at your K.P.I.s or real time dashboards about your performance. Also, have a think about how you can empower consumers like Raj who are increasingly making critical business or life decisions based on real time data as they interact with the worlds around them.