In Europe, an average of 1.5 million apps are downloaded per month, but if you take a closer look, you will find that there are hardly any new apps. The most common apps are becoming increasingly important– especially Facebook and chat programs such as WhatsApp, WeChat, or Snapchat. Hundreds of new apps are launched every day, but the interest in them and their success is rapidly diminishing.
New mega trends in modern communication have emerged: Conversational OS, chatbots and the contextual playing of content. In addition to their convenient use, they are mainly directed against the existing app infrastructure. The logic: Users want to pick up content where they operate – that was the mobile phone in the first expansion stage, now it's WhatsApp and Facebook’s Messenger. The ultimate challenge to the success of new applications: providing a logical link to these killer apps. Conversational OS will bring the biggest change: the audio interface, which can be used with natural speech is already omnipresent, even if it is not yet used intensively. Whether It's Apple, Google, Microsoft or Amazon, everyone is working hard to advance voice communication, particularly as it can be ideally linked to the Internet of Things. Known example: Google Home (also "How important is IoT for commerce?"). Perfect example: the Chinese Whatsapp clone "WeChat" does offer since quite some time already a wealth of services that can be accessed by voice: ordering a taxi or pizza, paying, finding packages and of course also finding the best route.
What does all this have to do with digital retail marketing? In the future, a user will no longer need to install an app or find a website to use a service. Killer apps are there to help. At the same time, however, he is at the mercy of these platforms and must probably resign himself to reserving a not inconsiderable amount of his advertising budget for a marketing cost factor that has long been ignored. Namely, that his service is the first when a user orders generic pizza and does not explicitly ask for "Luigi's Pizza". At Amazon's Alexa in the US, this very scenario is already a reality – if a user orders a bottle of champagne through Alexa ‘s same hour delivery guarantee, Amazon can choose which brand delivered by courier one hour later – giving it an amazing power to negotiate the margin with the manufacturer.
The Shopify blog provides a very helpful overview about the effects of Conversational OS: "How conversational commerce is forever changing the way we shop".
Even more exciting is the question of how Conversational OS will affect websites. It is safe to assume that their importance will decline drastically in the coming years, perhaps apart from webshops.