Industry 4.0 & Luxury Brands
Abstract
Luxury brands are facing pressure to reach a younger customer base that spends more time online, produce goods in a sustainable manner and combat forgery. Industry 4.0 powered by blockchain technology can support these goals. While this process will begin at the level of production, it will ultimately unlock a new type of consumer environment, way of engaging and marketing to consumers, and ways of remembering and valuing a wide range of objects.
The first step in introducing these technologies will be to set up means by which the object that is produced is tracked over the course of its entire lifecycle from production through ownership to recycling, destruction, or potential archiving. There are a number of challenges to achieving this vision. Many of them lie around how legacy manufacturing and data systems interact with each other and how they might come to interact with IoT devices and with blockchain record keeping. Supporting interoperability ultimately translates to a richer and more personalized user experience. Through the use of digital twins and AR / VR, this entire process can become immersive while new horizons open for how that object is collected, displayed, and incorporated within an economy of memory.
There are three essential consequences of such an investment:
The Active Object - The tokenization of the object allows for a new level of security, transparency, authenticity, and protection of the most precious data associated with an object such as location and ownership. Beyond the blockchain architecture, the general public will have to become more comfortable with owning a digital wallet and how to effectively handle the key that provides access.
The Active Consumer or the Gamification of Consumer Experience - It will be important for companies to support a compelling experience at the intersection of the physical and digital. Such a stage would be powered by AR/VR while also including physical installations to support that experience.
Economies of Utopia and Memory - A vision of the future is informed by past experiences. After several decades prioritizing what is happening now and the next innovation, the power of tokenization and blockchain to inscribe an asset with massive amounts of data creates a new opportunity for past records to directly inform how we imagine future states as well as what actually comes to pass.
As luxury brands consider investing in Industry 4.0 standards, it will be essential to track how they can support an enhanced user experience while also refocusing the organization around the assets they produce and how they can be better tracked throughout their lifecycle to support greater efficiency. It will also be important to consider a number of the more traditional metrics that are standard across industries so that the adoption of new technology is driving the profitability, growth, and sustainability of the brand.