This Week in Innovation: Attention Economy

This Week in Innovation: Attention Economy

On today’s podcast of This Week in Innovation, our CTO, Brian Sathianathan talks with podcast co-host, Jeff Roster, about how retailers can leverage attention economics. In short, the attention economy positions humans’ attention as a scarce commodity and therefore businesses must fight for potential consumers’ attention as an economic resource. 

Brian reminds us that a consumer’s attention is not free, and that retailers must create value with consumers’ time– benefiting both the consumer and the retailer. Brian then walks us through the percentage of reach certain platforms have on consumers (e.g. Youtube reaches 32% of the internet population, Instagram reaches 18.7%, etc.) The discussion then highlights how there are various touchpoints for any given retailer. We don’t experience retail with just the brick-and-mortar store, or even with a mobile app; we experience retail with those two examples, plus a website, and through Google or Apple maps and via social media, and so on. This insight then prompts Jeff to inquire about super-apps.

Super-apps are incredibly favorable in many countries within Asia, with Chinese super-app, WeChat, being a very popular example. Super-apps are mobile or web applications that provide multiple services including payment processing, social media, and instant messaging, for example. Jeff asks Brian if there are any prominent super-apps within Western retail and Brian explains that it just hasn’t hit the market here in the Western world–yet. This is something retailers should pay close attention to, as super-apps can truly transform the way we capture consumers’ attention in a sort of one-stop-shop way. 

Jeff then asks Brian how the prediction of a looming recession will or will not impact the attention economy. Brian alludes to how although COVID negatively affected many consumers’ shopping habits, it also increased others’ need for spending in the retail space. He assures retailers that though there will always be ups and downs with the prediction of an economic downturn, attention economics will remain intact, because consumers’ attention remains an important, consistent, and scarce commodity. When asked what retailers should be doing right now, Brian advises to leverage AI technology to “unleash the power of machine learning.” Brian asserts that now, more than ever, retailers must have data on their consumers in meaningful ways, and be able to know their consumers’ shopping patterns in a personal and contextual manner. 

Want to learn more about how to leverage AI to unlock important data about your customers and how that impacts attention economics? Connect with us here, at Iterate.ai, we use our low-code platform, Interplay®, to support businesses from various industries with application development.