Real. Virtual. Same Difference

2009. Virtual world, Second Life reported a GDP of $ 567 million. I was incredulous of this whole 'real meets virtual' fantasy-prophecy.

2010. Hundreds of enthusiasts showed up at a Tokyo district, one weekend, armed with iPhones, GPS and an augmented reality app to go on a real world scavenger hunt. I remained skeptical.

2011. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a hallowed institution dating back to 1866, announced that it would use Google Goggles, an image recognition mobile app, to provide information on its exhibits. I became a believer. I had to. What with Flickr geo-fencing and my best pal waking up at 2 am, on a Saturday morning, so he can harvest grapes on Farmville to save them from a snowstorm. I stood no chance.

BANGALORE, INDIA: Like it or not, the once solid boundaries between the digital and physical world have turned fluid. Even (the usually circumspect) social scientists have thrown in their lot with technophiles and visionaries, to reject the duality of real and virtual.

Now, is there a 'so what' to this story? You bet.

According to a global media investment management company, at $ 85 billion, Internet advertising accounted for 17 per cent of global expenditure on advertising in 2011. Digital marketing is now serious business. However, for all its progress, digital marketing and strategy largely operates within a cocoon, in a digital island separated from the brick and mortar world.

That explains why a product purchased on an ecommerce site usually cannot be picked up from the store's nearest retail outlet, or why terms and conditions of sale do not always match in an online and physical store, or why there is a difference in the checkout experience of your favourite department store and its virtual storefront.

My view is that digital marketing strategy cannot stay inside a cyber silo, when outside, consumers have stopped differentiating between what is real and what used to be virtual, but is now equally real! What must digital marketers do to align their actions with the consumer's way of thinking? And what can technology do to help their case?

At the risk of sounding simplistic, I believe that what marketers need is to move their mindset from compartmentalization to unification. And let it guide everything thereon.

Let us examine this in the context of digital assets. Today, technology makes it possible to consolidate an organization's digital assets - web campaign material, graphics, collateral, and content - on a single platform, which can be accessed by the entire extended marketing ecosystem.

The platform is dynamic and real-time, which means that any change in any digital asset is automatically and instantly reflected. But marketers with a unified mindset will climb to the next level to share even their organization's "experience script" through this platform. In doing so, they will ensure that their brand of consumer experience, that they've painstakingly scripted, is available to the entire ecosystem, and ready for deployment on all channels, so that customers enjoy the same brand-experience at each and every touch point.

What is more, any significant event, trend or market feedback received through one channel, such as the retail outlet, can be fed back to the experience script and acted upon uniformly in all future transactions, in the physical or virtual realm.

Now, apply the 'unified mindset' to the delivery channel. With the walls coming down, a customer instruction, such as a standing instruction for deliveries before noon, received on one channel, can be ported seamlessly in real-time to all the others so the customer enjoys the same quality of service should he choose another channel of purchase the next time around.

Analytics can create further unification and improve experience by identifying instructions ('Please use biodegradable polythene packing for my shipment to Japan'.), which might apply to a certain category of transactions, and modifying the experience script to prompt the service desk to proactively enquire if those instructions must be followed, the next time such a transaction occurs. ('Would you like us to use biodegradable polythene packing?')

Actually, this is not such a far out idea. Tesco, the UK based retailing giant has launched 'Home Plus' virtual stores in South Korea's subway stations. Commuters can browse through virtual shelves on a screen, scan the QR codes of products they need using their smartphone, and place their order for home delivery. The store, which already has the customers' details and preferences, uses that information to add value to the shopping experience.

Digital marketers can even open up their 'real is the same as virtual' channels to customers, to enable them to share experiences and ideas. This is possible with the help of context transfer technology, which enables users to encapsulate rich complex information - like an idea or an experience or a combination of purchases - within a digital code and share that with the world at large.

In fact, the Tokyo scavenger hunt used similar technology to create clues, which players hunted down and scanned for information that would lead them to the next step. If alternative reality isn't your thing, here is a more mundane example. Imagine that a canny shopper figures out a way to combine various offers in an end-of-season sale to maximize bang for her buck.

If the store is equipped with the technology to transfer digital context, the shopper can, with the help of a mobile app, create a digital code for her winning combo on the spot, and instantly post it on the store's online forum for other avid shoppers among her friends to make use of.

While the routine use of context transfer technology might be some distance away, knowledge is already being exchanged between the real and virtual worlds in other ways. A "real meets virtual" interaction between a town planner and an online game designer concluded that the virtual world would insinuate itself deeper and deeper into the real one and that the wild, experimental building designs seen on gaming sites today would influence physical architecture in the future.

This is nothing but another type of expectation spillover. People's online consumption experience has colored their expectations from the real world, and vice versa. Hence, they want self-service channels to replicate the personal attention showered by an enthusiastic sales assistant. At the same time, they want the service rep at the local supermarket to respond in real-time.

On a related note, expectations are also spilling over from one vertical to another. This can take the unwary by surprise. For instance, in future, travellers might demand that insurance companies allow them to insure the duration of a flight rather than their air travel for the whole year. Remember, they are the same people who are today buying only the sports section of the online daily, when previously they would pick up the entire morning paper from a local newsstand. I seriously doubt that the insurance industry is prepared for this. But, more of that another place, another time.

Marketers will do well to establish digital forums to capture this vital metric of expectation spillover. They must leverage social analytics to track behaviors that are suggestive of spillover from other industries, or from the virtual to the real.

They must also take product marketing and merchandizing down the same path, where virtual meets real. In some years, static product displays will be a thing of the past. Augmented reality combined with image recognition technology makes it possible to change end caps or personalize product shelves depending on who is passing through the aisle. (Lactose intolerant? Voila, you'll only see non-dairy creamers!)

It's the same with communication. With organizations becoming highly dispersed, interpersonal relationships, and the influence they exert on decision making, are increasingly becoming virtual, but no less real. That being said, virtual interaction has also seeped into the physical. Recall the last meeting you were at, and the text messages you sent to people inside the room? I rest my case.

Samson David is vice-president and global head, Business Platforms, Infosys Limited and Ajay Anand is global head, Digital Marketing Practice, Infosys Limited.