Augmented Customer Strategy

6Redesigning the Customer’s Role in a Connected World

Digital technology has profoundly changed the way customer relationships are managed, with marketing and CRM professionals using new digital and mobile channels on a daily basis and massively exploiting the data collected along customer journeys. However, marketers will soon have to take a new step forward: the Internet of Things (IoT). According to Benghozi et al. [BEN 09], the IoT refers to:

“a network of networks that allows, through standardized and unified electronic identification systems and mobile wireless devices, to directly and unambiguously identify digital entities and physical objects and thus to be able to retrieve, store, transfer and process, without discontinuity between the physical and virtual worlds, the related data”.

The IoT thus creates a sort of link between the physical and virtual worlds and increases the possibilities of connection, identification, transmission and tracking of individuals in their daily places, at work, shopping, on holiday, etc. Technologies for connecting short-range and long-range objects are now spreading on a large scale: RFID chips, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth (beacons for example¹), cellular networks (GSM, etc.), low power wide area networks (LPWA, such as LoRa or SigFox²), etc. IDATE forecasts 155 billion connected objects in 2025 worldwide, corresponding to an average annual growth rate of 14%³. For Hoffman and Novak [HOF 17, p. 1178], these new possibilities for connecting consumers ...