Business to Robot to Consumer, or B2R2C – how will it affect us?

B2R2C, more commonly known as Business-to-Robot-to-Consumer, is a trend that many of us will face shortly. At the moment, it is believed that we are selling large sums of money to robots. More specifically, this amount will reach 241.1 billion dollars by 2023. This shows that we will have to adapt to the ongoing change towards a ‘Business-Robot-Consumer’ model in the near future.

Marketing is changing at an almost unimaginable pace, with voice assistants, artificial intelligence (AI), and various digital avatars now becoming the middle ground between brand and consumer.

Will key marketers have to rethink successful branding strategies in the context of the wider market penetration of these tools?

Will robots that take care of us, cook for us, and deliver our food be the most effective tool for brands to reach consumers?

According to Kim Bates, Chief Futurist at Faith Popcorn’s Brain Reserve, ”the B2R2C model will characterise future customer behaviour. Our robots, which act as intermediaries in this model, will have more control over what we eat, our diets, and our health regimes. They will also influence our entertainment activities and the goods we bring home.

According to the futurist, we will be influenced by robots at home that will look after our wellbeing, prepare healthy meals, and generally determine our diet and lifestyle in the future. This is all thanks to the fact that robots will help to take the stress out of everyday life.

Life in the Year 2021 looks like this:

e-commerce is booming here, and more and more companies are robotizing their services and ways of communicating. Roboticisation is helping us to reduce the stress in our daily lives so that we can enjoy our lives more.

This is causing marketers to question their previous decisions on whether their companies have good enough marketing strategies in place to attract customers in sectors where robots are starting to dominate.

It is important for marketers to remember that if a brand strategy can last forever, then brand activation will always change. There will be new customers in the world who need to be convinced to buy a product or service. It is these customers who are the middle way that will take us to the human being as the final consumer.

Millions of people around the world already use virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google. These tools use artificial intelligence to try to guess what a person is thinking, how to complete searches on search engines, and predict what the next day might look like. Voice assistants already know what we don’t need from our tools, so for marketers, this is a signal that existing marketing strategies need to be revamped.

For marketers, we would like to suggest 2 important factors to pay attention to.

The first is building relationships with key influencers that are right for the company. Today’s customer needs proof of a social group, so if you communicate through this particular influencer, you will be more likely to attract potential customers to your product.

The second factor is the use of social networks, which are currently the most powerful tool in B2C communication. B2R2C relationships are not only about developing them but also identifying key influencers to reach the target market. Although it may sound very futuristic at the moment, robots are already among the key influencers.

Lil Miquela (https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/) is one of the example robots that brands are already starting to use. She already has more than 2.5 million followers on Instagram, proving a high level of influence that only continues to grow.

While we travel through the years of an artificial world:

• brand consumers will evolve from being just humans to robots, virtual beings, and even augmented reality humans,
• more or less, changes in who is in charge will affect us as consumers, and as a result, the whole marketing industry will need to change,
• brands should explore and adapt to the ever-changing technologies to differentiate themselves from the competition and think outside the box.