101: Borrowing Concepts from Robotics for Brand Strategy

In January of 2018 I started a certificate program in Artificial Intelligence from Columbia University. Although the course itself is technical in nature, as I progress through I've started making connections to apply in the world of strategy. I'll be sharing these thoughts and observations on the connections between the technical material and business strategy here on LinkedIn and on my blog.

In Robotics in order to execute a task within any physical space, a robot needs to know where the target is relative to itself but it's not enough to know where everything is solely on a “base coordinate system” (which gets the robot from point A to point B), a robot needs also be able to compute where things are relative to each other for which it uses multiple coordinate systems ("world coordinate system", "tool coordinate system" etc.) This idea got me thinking….if a robot must be fully aware of spatial relationships between the objects near its main target then shouldn’t brands come up with a way to be aware of the relationships between the moments in their consumers lives instead of focusing on the ones that relate to only their products/services?

The current manifestation of a consumer journey is actually just a consumer spatial map of behaviors and actions relative to the brand. Most consumer journey maps help us map in a linear and sometimes a “loop” or cyclical way WHERE our consumers are with their thoughts and actions. Some journeys might even map where the brand or business is relative to all the moments on that journey but what we can’t grasp from this type of mapping is that those moments for many circumstances are fleeting or difficult to pinpoint---mostly because you also need to know where those moments are relative to each other as well as moments that may come before or after the ones we are targeting. In simpler terms how can we really understand how moments in a consumers life impact each other?

Let’s use the example of a simple grasping task. Even in a simple task like “grasping” (used in many shipping factories) a robot must map the relativity of one object to another and ultimately its target using something called a transform (see image below).

So if we think about a brand that might have a broad range of products and services---say a consumer bank--- then we know we have financial interactions that are had over lifetime and some that are daily. We know some are positive, neutral and that some are negative and we know that money is spent/borrowed and we know money is saved/made.

How can we plot the relationships of all of these moments on one journey? We can’t---we could make a journey for say obtaining a mortgage loan with your typical stages (awareness, consideration, application etc.) but how the first paycheck that was saved and the subsequent times we checked that account until we had enough for the down payment which led to the application of the loan would be a journey too large and complicated to really understand usefully.

But we can use a Cartesian Coordinate System (a mathematical coordinate system that can be used in robotics as a coordinate frame for the world around the robot) to map all of these moments. This can help us build "strategic transforms" (making this term up) that help us understand the relationship between moments to create business or brand strategy against.

It’s a good way to visualize moments and then even take a string of them and build a consumer journey out of those.

OR

take a consumer journey and use this method to map additional moments to understand new consumer pathways. Pictured below is the very initial version of the banking example I mentioned above.