Brands to start abandoning their in-house apps: Gartner

• The shifting shopping experience with augmented reality
• The exit of screens from the web browsing experience

In line with Gartner’s predictions that by 2025, every industry will be transformed by digital businesses, we are witnessing a shift from being in a stage of infrequent inconvenience due to digital disruption to experiencing a consistent rate of change.

In the coming year, Gartner anticipates the emergence of some of the digital trends that will have an impact on the way Malaysian consumers interact with technology and how companies can leverage this.

One of the key trends we foresee for 2017 is that digital experience and engagement will continue drawing people into innovative nonstop virtual interactions.

The shifting shopping experience with augmented reality.

The recent popularity of augmented reality (AR) applications such as Pokémon GO has helped bring AR into the mainstream, fuelling consumer appetite for immersive AR experiences.

Coupled with mobile device usage becoming an ingrained behaviour, which further blurs the lines between the physical and digital worlds, we will see retailers and brand marketers incorporating AR applications to enhance the shopping experience.

The exit of screens from the web browsing experience.

New audio-centric technologies, such as Google Home and Amazon's Echo (pic above) are making access to dialogue-based information ubiquitous and spawning new platforms based on "voice-first" interactions.

By eliminating the need to use ones' hands and eyes for browsing, vocal interactions extend the utility of web sessions to contexts such as driving, cooking, walking, socializing, exercising and operating machinery. As a result, the share of waking hours devoid of instant access to online resources will approach zero.

Brands to start abandoning their in-house apps in favour of established ones.

Many brands are finding that the level of adoption, customer engagement and return on investment (ROI) delivered by their own mobile applications are significantly less than the expectations that underpinned their initial app investment.

Adopting established third-party apps such as Facebook messenger instead will lower barriers to discovery, while offering similar levels of engagement at a fraction of the investment, support and marketing cost. Many companies will evaluate these experiences against their under-performing applications and opt to reduce their losses by allowing their apps to expire.

We are excited to see what 2017 brings as technology continues to evolve. With the continued digital innovation, the outcomes will reshape the way customers engage and affect the nature of business’s future IT investments.  

Daryl Plummer is the managing vice president, chief of Research and chief Gartner Fellow

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