At IDC, we believe that understanding the consumers’ mindset around technology is vitally important to all tech companies, regardless of whether your business is B2C, B2B, or B2B2C. This is because irrespective of what type of technology you deliver—be it hardware, software, or services—what your end users want and need is increasingly dictated by their experiences as human beings, not employees. In a world where consumers’ experience with new technologies drives the trends impacting IT decision makers, we increasingly expect the consumer tail to wag the enterprise dog. Grasping this distinction is essential, as is the fact that we expect significant disruptions in the way consumers engage with and spend on technology in the coming years.

To address these fundamental beliefs, IDC has embarked on a multi-year journey to build out new research to drive a better, more profound understanding of the consumer. At the center of this research is our Future Consumer Framework, which consists of eight primary segments that, when taken together, represent a holistic view of how consumers leverage technology across the many facets of their lives. The eight primary categories of the framework include Entertainment, The Home, Money, Shopping, Personal Mobility, Travel & Dining, Lifelong Learning, and Well-being. For those familiar with IDC’s Future of Enterprise research portfolio, it’s helpful to think of that as the yin to the yang of Future Consumer. See the image below for a view of the Future Consumer Framework.

IDC leverages the framework across three primary research areas: The Consumer Pulse, which surveys consumers in seven countries about their current and near-term attitudes toward the eight segments, with particular attention paid to the concept of brand trust. The Consumer Market Model (CMM) leverages the framework to create five-year forecasts of consumer internet penetration, online activities, eCommerce, and other services spending across 51 countries. Finally, the Future Consumer Agenda seeks to provide a futurist’s view of significant trends and technology shifts across the consumer spectrum.

All three programs leverage data to help guide near- and long-term thinking and endeavor to drive thought leadership across the consumer technology category. They build upon and synthesize data and insights from our existing consumer portfolio of products that include device coverage (PCs, Tablets, Smartphones, Smart Home Devices, AR/VR Headsets, and Wearables) as well as market-specific categories (TV/OTT Video and Gaming and eSports). 

Early Consumer Pulse Insights

IDC officially launched the Future Consumer programs in early 2022, and all three programs already drive significant new perspectives. For example, our initial Consumer Pulse Entertainment survey yielded dozens of important insights about consumers’ use of technology to engage with new and evolving content, create content themselves, and even monetize their work. A few essential insights:

• Social media sites now constitute the biggest source of video content watched by consumers, even bigger than linear TV or streaming.  
• Each successive generation spends more time on entertainment than the previous, meaning that Gen Z spends demonstrably more time engaged with entertainment than Boomers or older.
• Gaming represents a larger percentage of the time spent on entertainment among younger generations, too, but that number is sizeable across all generations.
• Content creators who say they don’t make money from their work tend to use their smartphones for content creation most of the time. In contrast, those who do earn tend to leverage a wide range of devices more evenly, including smartphones, tablets, PCs, and standalone cameras. 

These data points are just the tip of the Consumer Pulse iceberg. Because we’re leveraging a robust survey methodology across seven countries, we’re able to slice and dice our results to surface particularly useful data points that inform both our near-term and long-term views of a category. And remember, this is just one of the eight category-based surveys.

Assessing TAMs with the CMM

Another major launch this year was our Consumer Market Model. Built upon a decade-old service (formerly called the New Media Market Model), the CMM team leveraged brand new IDC survey data, existing IDC device installed base data, and numerous third-party sources to create a massive new dataset that examines total available markets (TAMs) across a range of categories. The CMM aims to be the one-stop shop for consumer-centric forecasts that you can’t find anywhere else, backed by data and analyst insights.

After a year of new research and a taxonomy overhaul, the new CMM has now launched and is driving key insights. A few from the U.S. include:

• Despite predictions that online fitness would fall off fast after the pandemic, the CMM projects a 13.3% CAGR in total spending on online fitness services from 2021 to 2026 in the U.S. spending through mobile and non-mobile devices (PCs, set-to-boxes, etc.) is expected to reach $2.2 B in 2026, an 87% increase from 2021 at the height of the pandemic.

• The CMM now has new line items, such as consumer AR/VR services. The model projects that there will be 8.3 million new AR/VR-related services users in the U.S. by 2026. Spending on mobile and non-mobile devices for those services is expected to hit $1 billion between 2024 and 2025 and will carry a robust CAGR of 16.6% through 2026. 

• The CMM projects that sleep-monitoring/tech services total spending in the U.S. will grow by almost $2 billion between now and 2026. This new line item is increasing at a 12.6% CAGR, with the CMM projecting that 22.5 million new users have been added since 2019.

This is just a taste of what the CMM can provide, and the above numbers are all U.S. only. Remember, we have this data across 51 countries and seven regions and can deliver worldwide rollup.

Predicting the Future

Both the Consumer Pulse and the CMM are data-driven products enhanced by our great team of analysts’ insights. The Future Consumer Agenda program looks to leverage these great insights and follows the resulting near-term trends and hypotheses out even further. The goal is to equip tech companies, governments, non-government agencies (NGOs), and others with insights that drive their long-term strategies. A few predictions from our recent Future Consumer FutureScape illustrate the point:

• By the end of 2025, more than 20% of consumers worldwide will have begun using device-as-a-service subscriptions for their personal electronics and smart home needs instead of buying devices outright.
• By 2025, younger diners will help drive 65% of restaurant orders to be for takeout (delivery, pickup, or drive-thru), accelerating the growth of kitchen-only locations and third-party food ordering apps.
• By 2027, 35% of consumer flagship phone buyers will use a Smart Set (smartphone, watch, and earwear) for entertainment and getting around, pushing leading brands to build content for Smart Sets.

It’s early days in the Agenda program, but to drive our thinking further, we recently created a taxonomy document for this program that adds additional granularity to our Future Consumer Framework.

The Coming Disruption

At the top of this post, I alluded to the idea that we see major disruptions in how consumers engage with and buy technology coming down the pipe. This is based on our recognition that younger generations view and use technology in radically different ways than older ones, and they will retain these unique dispositions even as they age. As these cohorts shift to become a majority of consumer spending, they will drive major sea changes in the consumer and commercial technology markets. Once you see it—as illustrated below—you can’t unsee it.

This is why IDC has dedicated research dollars, analyst resources, and a number of upcoming special events to cover the consumer space and the changes we see coming. So regardless of whether you’re a technology company focused on B2C, B2B, or B2B2C, it’s vitally important that you understand the coming wave. One way to begin this education: Contact your IDC salesperson, or Future Consumer Sales Specialist Brad Kennedy (bkennedy@idc.com), to set up a free presentation with the Future Consumer team. Or attend our in-person breakfast briefing at CES called Rise of the Future Consumer: Are You Ready for the Seismic Shift? If you won’t be in Las Vegas in early January, contact Brad, and we’ll follow up with a recorded version of the presentation after the show.

Marketing and sales teams have been made to be hyperaware of the fact that consumers and buyers are inundated with content. This information overload and increasing channel mix and outreach mechanisms has been argued to have decreased attention span. What we have is a situation where sales needs leads, marketing needs to drive those leads, consumers have too much to pay attention to and an unforgiving economy created a decline in buyer response. It’s less than ideal.

You can’t alter the economy. You can’t change attention spans. So, what can you do? The answer always is look internally at what you can control. You can control your brand voice. The answers, however, always seem so simple, but the execution is the major challenge.  

Brand Voice and The Acceleration of Marketing’s Digital Transformation

Content marketing is a customer-centric marketing approach focused on creating and distributing relevant, engaging, connected and edible content across channels, to help buyers achieve their objectives, paving the path toward profitable customer action. For years, the marketing industry has been talking about one voice. But it’s not one marketing voice—that would mean there should be one sales voice as well. It’s just one voice, marketing and sales. Too often, organizations can’t align the two. Essentially there is the digital dialogue that gets created by someone in a marketing function and that needs to tie into sales, who are having a more interpersonal dialogue. The promises marketing makes in their digital dialogue are the promises that sales have to keep. Yet, the interpersonal dialogues that are taking place by the sales team may be conveying different value and propositions. This problem has been accelerated through marketing’s digital transformation and with everyone living mostly online now.

To capture today’s buyers, digital and interpersonal engagement strategies must be aligned

Conversations to buyers today are happening in parallel, and what results is critical—the buying community doesn’t receive the message they need or expect from the organization (or brand). You may witness this through lack of engagement. Here you have an abundance of marketing content that is in market, several sales pitches and yet no one is engaging at a volume that matches the effort.

There is a significant gap in communication during the sales process between marketing and sales. Marketing data is not used. Sales is frustrated with support from marketing. Ultimately, the sales and marketing “disconnect” prevents revenue generation from being optimal. There is a critical need for marketers and sales, together, to engage more effectively with their audience, and align on the same value proposition.

Learn More: IDC’s MarketScape Lead Generation Package

Buyers are simply trying to do two things: 1. explore and evaluate solutions, then 2. purchase and optimize them.  Sales is trying to adapt to selling in this hyper digital world as B2B commerce moves increasingly online. It’s a marketer’s job to understand the buyer’s intent signals as they move along in their journey. While marketers have to activate these buyers at the right time, many will find success when they figure out how best to support their sales teams. Because as you engage your buyer, you are trying to educate them by demonstrating value statements that tie to their pain points and needs. As marketers nurture this type of dialogue digitally, the buyer’s interest in the solution grows and the marketing moves them to a position where an opportunity is created for a discussion with sales. Now sales must keep the promises made in the value statements presented by marketing. If the promises don’t align, or aren’t kept, the relationship is lost.  

Related Reading: How to Overcome B2B Digital Marketing Challenges

A New Marketing and Sales Model

The digital and interpersonal dialogue (marketing and sales) exists to align with the customer journey. In our ACE Framework, we introduce a new customer journey and present a new marketing and sales model, based on IDC’s latest research and deep dive into tech buyers and the transformation of digital marketing. The Adaptive Customer Engagement (ACE) model acknowledges that today’s buyers are digital-first; they are embracing digital channels for more than information gathering. Today’s digital buyers are diving into chat applications to complete buying tasks like getting quotes or attending virtual events.

74% of B2B tech buyers will buy more through eCommerce and work less with an in-person sales representative from here on out.   (source: IDC Perspective. The Digital-First Era Demands a New Marketing and Sales Model: Introducing Adaptive Customer Engagement ACE))

Related Reading: Client Engagement and Meaningful Dialogue, Virtually

Marketers and sales teams today aren’t talking to just one buyer, they are now talking to an entire buying cohort. In fact, more than a dozen individuals at an organization could have a need, based on their jobs to be done. For the longest time, sales and marketing operated in a linear model, “the funnel”. But it’s not about one person progressing through a linear journey any longer. The funnel lacks customer centricity and is perhaps why marketing and sales have failed to be able to nurture and build relationships among all the members in the buying committee.

The new ACE model was created by IDC because tech buyers expect value-based solutions to their pain points and business outcomes they’re accountable for. To achieve this, there needs to be marketing and sales messaging alignment.

Through this holistic adaptive customer engagement model, you want to be able to have a closed loop relationship with buyers who become clients. Essentially, once those promises made turn into promises kept, you need to be able to measure and articulate the value that you promised. That’s when you achieve the ultimate goal, customer loyalty.

Have a question about this topic and how you can build a customer-centric plan that accounts for sales enablement along the way? Let’s Talk

Introducing a new lead generation service! To make it easier for marketers to gain the most value of their IDC MarketScape and truly drive qualified leads, we have worked with Foundry to create an enticing lead generation package leveraging their media brands that capture proven customer engagements.

Related Resources:

Download: The New B2B Marketing Playbook
The Digital-First Era Demands a New Marketing and Sales Model:  Introducing Adaptive Customer Engagement

The oil and gas industry is facing the most significant transformation relative to any other sector driven by the global energy transition. A hydrocarbon producing industry seems the least likely to tackle the emissions and environmental challenges related to climate and energy transition, however, over 90% of companies in the oil and gas industry have already made declarations about their plans for net-zero targets, and many have already deployed capital to pursue an energy transition strategy. Global oil and gas firms across the long value chain are looking beyond maximizing profits and incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics into corporate performance assessments.

Originally driven by the United Nations, the energy transition and ESG movement has had substantial momentum propelling oil and gas leaders to engage technology partners to meet accepted global standards. In addition, the SEC’s March 2022 directive on climate change disclosures now mandates a quick transition to investor grade reporting. The O&G industry is among the most scrutinized on the planet. As regulators grapple with the competing interests in energy security and climate change, under investment in capital projects in the last many years, ESG is at the front and center of the discussion. Management teams for corporations are getting the message and steering toward ESG-driven values and metrics that are viewed as “sustainable” in the long term rather than strictly focusing on short-term profits. In the oil and gas energy transition survey, industry leaders cited regulations (or impending regulations) as the key driver to CO2 reductions, while financial return and brand considerations were also factors (see figure 1 below).

This ever-changing energy sustainability landscape creates additional complexity to an already sophisticated market global market construct. Investments in clean energy sources such as hydrogen, solar, wind, carbon capture, emissions measuring and reporting technologies, and many others will have a significant impact on the oil and gas business model throughout the industry value chain.

Digital will be a key component to many of the industry objectives. Not surprisingly, cost is viewed as a significant hurdle to CO2 reduction plans. The collective view from the industry is that data access as it relates to energy usage and emissions to measure progress is the second leading barrier (see figure 2 below). The increased complexity of the future oil and gas operating model will significantly boost data volumes and data management requirements. Companies with superior digital competencies are likely to be leaders in energy transition.

Roadmaps to meet company net-zero and energy transition targets, along with motivations for pursuing certain goals vary widely, and many are still in early days. Many market onlookers, and even some industry insiders, question the achievability of some of the targets. This is an industry transformation that has never been faced at this scope to date. Significant uncertainty remains around economics, regulatory changes, technology advancement and many other variable factors of the energy transition movement. Industry leaders view many of these challenges as achievable, but certainly challenging (see figure 3).

In IDC’s 2022 Oil and Gas Energy Transition survey, we analyze these concepts with oil and gas industry leaders globally. While energy transition is a very broad and complex concept, digital transformation and the advancement of digital technology will be a significant component of the movement. The survey sheds light on the coming changes to the industry business model and significant implications to technology vendors, alike. The future is now for the industry and oil and gas leaders need to embrace the transformation.

To learn more about the Oil and Gas Energy Transition, click the button below to watch a video on the topic. To access the Oil and Gas Energy Transition survey and associated published research, contact your IDC account representative to schedule a 30-minute consultation with me, Andrew Meyers. 

Over the past while, IDC has written a lot about how a global recession and inflation will affect the ICT market.  You might have heard us reference what’s happening as a “storm of disruption.” When you’re seeing investments dry up, leads diminishing, experiencing more supply chain issues, then there’s hardly a better way to describe our current economic situation.  

A potential global recession and the “As-a-Service’ technology market

In the summer, IDC addressed the anticipated effects of a potential recession in the ‘As-a-Service’ technology world. This post puts spending patterns into perspective. The trend is clear; in a world where enterprises have shifted the majority of their IT spend to subscription-based cloud and as-a-service options, targeted reductions in IT spend will look very different, compared to the past.

Today’s skills shortage also makes cutting labor a less than feasible strategy. Positions are hard to fill because of a shortage of people with the right skills, an inability to match flexible work models or salaries are unaffordable. Without being able to hire the right talent, more pressure is put on remaining employees to keep pace with business needs and on leadership to execute business strategies, tactics, and development plans. Economic, geopolitical, and personal disruptions are driving workers to look for opportunities with more flexibility and better pay. Keeping and attracting talent requires deployment of new technology and new skills for both IT and line of business (LOB) employees. 25% of companies surveyed said that hiring for tech roles is very difficult in both IT and LOB. Organizations are taking an average of 3.2 months to find the right talent.When organizations are faced with talent shortages, they see reductions in operational efficiency, profits, employee productivity, customer satisfaction and cost savings. Based on the current outlook, IDC has updated its scenario for worldwide IT spending, accounting for what tech suppliers can expect in 2023. 

Insights for the tech market

It’s more important now, than ever, to take the time to understand the research available, addressing spending pattern shifts, and changing buyer behavior. This is the insight that can fuel your playbook during a very turbulent economic time. In fact, IDC research reveals that buyers are not planning to make wholesale cuts across all tech categories, but they will be selective about where they cut.

How to respond to this business disruption and thrive:

• Get more granular with your research. It’s one thing to understand the macro effect of the recession on your industry, it’s another to drill down and understand your specific buyers, how they are triggered and how they will be allocating their IT budget for services like yours. IDC helps you understand buyer behavior, with a research practice that integrates unparalleled global primary market research, technology market data, and analyst expertise to provide insight into the needs of your technology decision maker.

• Make smarter GTM decisions by leveraging data and insight when they’re needed. Even in the face of economic uncertainty, limited budgets, and constrained resources, business leaders must still show market growth. IDC’s Data & Analytics Solutions provide data critical for effectively mapping market demand, identifying key customer and partner targets, and positioning and out-performing competitors. Our robust set of modular data products makes it easy to use only what you need and retain budget for other strategic investments in turbulent times.

• When the economy rebounds, you don’t want to find yourself behind the competition. Continue to make strides with your customers by quantifying your business value. IDC’s Business Value practice helps you by quantifying the value of your solution, then giving you the tools out of that research that build awareness and engagement with your buyers and walks them through an ROI validation process, leaving no question left in their mind as to whether they need your solution.

• Help your sales teams convey the value of your solutions, rather than resort to product-feature selling, which will not close the business today. We put together this short checklist to help sales teams change their buyer conversations and start value selling.

• In periods of uncertainty, resiliency and agility are crucial. You need to make decisions, and good decisions should be grounded in custom data, mapped to your business. IDC’s market sizing and assessment framework helps you build a resilient strategic plan to help you navigate today’s business disruptions.

While the news about the economic downturn has weighed heavily upon us, it’s crucial to make decisions based on research, rather than panic. There are tools available that you should be using to drive your decisions, and those tools are grounded in tech market data to help you better understand your specific buyers and markets, navigate your next moves and to enable your sales teams so they can thrive.

While the playbook looks different today, tech companies who suffered less from previous economic storms did so because they adopted agile and flexible planning and work methods. In this way, you can continue to drive your business forward, rather than stand still or retreat.

It’s rapidly becoming apparent that digital transformation (DX) is not a finite destination, but rather a journey. Early DX initiatives were siloed and focused on short term gains. Organizations later scaled these initiatives across the enterprise, with a broader set of long-term goals, Today, organizations are looking at how they can leverage their digital capabilities for new value creation. This includes new operational efficiencies, how an organization engages with customers, how it attracts and retains employees, as well as new digital products and services. At IDC, we are calling organizations in this stage a “digital-first business”.

Because a digital-first business seeks to increase operational efficiency and productivity and improve both customer and employee experiences, these organizations need a new category of technology solutions for managing content. Cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), and new services-based architectures have made the legacy categories of capture, enterprise content management (ECM), content sharing and collaboration (CSC), digital asset management (DAM), and web content management (WCM) obsolete. In reality, these older labels refer to a set of use cases which are all supported by a common library of content services. These application categories made sense in the era of on-premises, standalone monolithic applications, but are cumbersome and inefficient in the context of the modern cloud and services architectures of the digital-first business.

Instead, IDC is proposing a new way to approach the content supply chain— a Unified Content Model that supports a common set of content-related services related to security, governance, archiving, measurement and analysis as well as the tasks to manage the supply chain stages shared by all content applications. The model also recognizes the need for sets of specialized services that may only apply to certain types of content or use cases. These services can be accessed and utilized via low-code/no-code tools to construct solutions for explicit jobs to be done that lead to specific business outcomes. In other words, the job to be done is separate from the supporting “plumbing” underneath. Solutions based on the Unified Content Model will orchestrate the content supply chain throughout the organization.

The Unified Content Model

The Unified Content Model has the following components:

• Interface to one or more data repositories – Repositories include structured and unstructured data, including text, image, audio, video, QR code assets and atomic componentized content.
• Measure/Analyze – A library of services to measure the usage and effectiveness of content. There is a closed feedback loop between measurements and the experiences that present jobs to be done.
• Manage – A set of services that are common to all use cases, including version control, templates, and permissions management.
• Domain–Specific Metadata Model – Common metadata that is shared across the content supply chain to facilitate interoperability, processing, and personalization.
• Plan, Produce, Publish, Promote – Categories that correspond to the “verbs” that describe actions performed on content as it traverses the supply chain journey. These are a set of services that may be chosen for a specific job to be done. These activities may be accomplished by a human, a machine, or both.
• Jobs to be Done – These are the content-centric activities that lead to specific business outcomes. Activities vary widely. Examples include
  • Retain and dispose of documents correctly
  • Execute non-disclosure agreement
  • Collaborate for image review and approval
  • Communicate quarterly financial results
  • Update product pricing information
  • Remove expired licensed materials
  • Stream episodes at a virtual event 
• Delivery Channel – Content may be delivered via a broad range of channels or edge devices – frequently delivered via more than one – depending on producer and consumer preferences. Content must be responsive and displayed in a manner that is appropriate for the channel.
• Experience – This layer describes the final recipient of the content. Note that recipients can be humans or technology.
  • Audience App Experience – Consumption/usage by employees, partners citizens, patients, students, accountholders, and other end users
  • Industry App Experience – Consumption/usage by industry users or applications, for example healthcare systems and portals, banking, or insurance policy systems
  • Departmental App Experience – Consumption/usage by the business user or business application, such as enterprise resource management (ERP) or human capital management (HCM)

Benefits of the Unified Content Model

Why should an organization adopt a Unified Content Model? Solutions architected according to the model will increase operational efficiency by eliminating content silos and duplicative applications and/or platforms. This will afford several benefits to organizations:

• Enforce a common brand and company “voice”
• Support a 360-degree view of the customer
• Efficiency in content creation, management and reuse across solutions and applications
• Scale in using best in class cloud-based services
• “Future-proof” technology by making it easier to add or substitute services and delivery channels
• Improve the overall experience for both content producers and content consumers

What the Unified Content Model Means for Organizations

In IDC research early in 2022, 46% of respondents indicated that improving operational efficiencies is the top business objective for content services investments. Of course, organizations can’t scrap existing workflows and related solutions overnight, but as modernization initiatives progress, organizations should adopt the Unified Content Model as a blueprint for that modernization. We are seeing implementations of the model appear in the marketplace as technology vendors leverage the opportunities afforded by cloud computing and services-based architectures to redesign the content repository and open it up for interplay between systems and actions. The value for these vendors comes not from reproducing the “plumbing” of content management but rather in the expertise in tasks of the content supply chain, jobs to be done or applications at the edge.

How to get started? Begin by evaluating your current content-centric workflows, stakeholders and applications asking the following questions:

• What content is your organization creating and for what purpose? How much of that content is redundant (or worse, uncontrolled)? What content can be (or should be) reused and/or used for multiple purposes?
• Who is producing, reviewing, approving, delivering the content? In other words, who participates in the content supply chain? What actions must be performed on that content?
• How is that content updated, revised, retained, redistributed, disposed of?
• Who (or what) is consuming the content and when? Is similar content consumed at various stages of a relationship or supply chain? What integrations are required with other enterprise systems? What formats are required for delivery at each stage?
• How are you measuring the use and effectiveness of your content?  Have you established a feedback loop? How do you know what is working and what is not?

Once you answer these questions, develop a plan to architect a solution that maximizes the storage, analysis, management and data descriptors of content based on the Unified Content Model with your developers, vendors and/or partners. Develop a migration and change management strategy to minimize disruption. Proceed down the path to greater content agility and becoming a digital-first business.

For more information on IDC’s research on unified content models, read our perspectives:

• Future of Customer Experience: Measuring Content Effectiveness to Reduce Customer Effort and Improve Customer Experience Satisfaction
• Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide Enterprise Content Strategies, 2022
• Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide Persuasive Content and Digital Experience Management Software, 2022
• Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide and U.S. Intelligent Document Processing, 2022