The Future I saw at CES

I went to CES with over 188,000 of my closest friends. In three days, my step-counter says I walked a total of 33.5 miles. There was a lot to see.

You can read all about the newest leaps and bounds in function and form in drones, AI, robotics, 5G, IoT, autonomous vehicles, home entertainment, and “gadgets” elsewhere. Much has already been written about “the best and brightest” of CES. Instead, I’m writing about the future of products and services marketing, advertising, and sales. And there are just two key insights.

Google had a large pavilion at the Las Vegas Convention Center that included a “Disneyland-like” ride. (Google also had over 34 large, private meeting suites at the Aria hotel, invitation only, for client meetings.) I stood in line for the ride and was impressed by the 300+ actual Google employees wearing their spiffy, white outfits and hats that vaguely reminded me of a “where’s Waldo” uniform. They stood out in the crowds. I spotted those white uniforms all over Las Vegas even after the exhibits closed every night. The Google employees were the most recognizable of all in the vast hordes, and the ones I interacted with were highly enthusiastic and proud to wear that uniform.

In fact, I applaud Google for having the most enthusiastic and genuinely proud employees running their exhibits compared to all others. Sure, we’ve all worn a company polo shirt at a trade show. We’ve all done booth duty. But I pride myself on reading people and sensing their mood, and every Google employee I interacted with was genuine. They were happy to wear their team uniform and happy to lean into their identity as Google employees. Uniforms are meant to promote team identity and downplay individual identity. And every one of the Googlers I met was comfortable in their corporate identity. 

One guy was holding a sign on a pole stating “15 minutes from this point in line” to get onto the ride. The woman in front of me complimented him on his Google earring. It was a logo with the familiar red, yellow, green, blue color scheme. Not sure if Google actually makes earrings or if he made one up from a lapel pin, but he was proudly wearing it in his ear. I asked him, “is that a tracking device?”, and he grinned and replied, “maybe”. You can’t pay employees to do that. They either embrace it and lean in or they give off a resentful vibe. Not this guy, he was sincere and happy to be tracked if that was part of the jewelry. (Which of course it was not -- the tracking device comment was a joke, but he enjoyed it in a way that signaled confidence and no offense taken.)

Towards the front of the line, there was a posted advisory stating that “photos will be taken of you during this ride and Google may use those photos as desired”. So now I’m also part of a tracking database, as if I wasn’t already, but that’s fine with me. The price of admission to the future is being tracked all the time, and likely being analyzed by AI for mood and reactions. CES revealed that cameras and sensors galore will be commonplace throughout your home, your car, your clothes, and your body soon enough. You’ll be tracked, measured and assessed moment by moment. As long as my right to privacy over my data means that my wife doesn’t get a report on everything I ate and drank in Las Vegas, then I’m ok with it.

So one takeaway about the future of sales is basically that your employees will either personify your corporate brand or they will not. If your entire staff loves your company so much that they enjoy wearing your uniform and choose to include corporate colors and logos in their personal fashion outside of work, it sends a message to the world that you are offering a culture, not just a product or service. This is not a bad thing, and it’s also not a dumb thing. It’s not necessarily supposed to be a corporate goal or (God-forbid) a corporate requirement that your employees self-identify with your company. No no no. It’s just a metric. It’s one thing to influence your staff to buy and use your products thanks to employee discounts. It’s quite another step for your employees to believe in your brand so much that they are your ambassadors outside of work. It’s one thing for you to “love your job”. It’s quite another thing for you to “love your company” and pull it into your personal life. If your employees are pulling your brand outside of work into their personal identity, you’re winning. That turns your entire staff into a sales organization. Everybody is selling all the time.

The other key takeaway was what happened when I finished the Google ride and wandered out of their pavilion. I walked a few yards to the next outdoor pavilion, which was much, much smaller than Google’s.

It felt more like a county fair. There was a man on a stage with a microphone. He had gathered a crowd. He was a good talker, smooth, and he was interacting with the crowd. He held up a small, copper wrist band. It was solid, tubular, and had a u-shape. It wasn’t a fully connected circle, the ends were flanged. It looked both crude and finely wrought at the same time. The speaker handed the bracelet to a person in the crowd and asked him to pass it around. He began asking the crowd, “does anybody know what this is? How old do you think it is? Where is it from?” People started shouting guesses back at him. Answers ranged from 2000 years old to “just made today”, and from “made in China” to “made in Africa”, and from “a child’s bracelet” to a “pet collar”. Finally, the speaker recalled the copper device back up on stage and he held it up for the crowd to see and he said, “this object is made of copper. It was made in Birmingham, England in 1843. It’s called a ‘manilla’ and it was used in the slave trade as currency. Europeans and Americans traded these manillas for slaves in Africa.”

The crowd got real quiet. They all stopped moving and stood very still for a moment. The speaker paused for a dramatic moment to let it sink in. Then he continued, “I am a public entertainer. I’m a rapper. Sometimes at my performances I pass this around and even bring people up on stage to handle it and guess what it is. Black people often cry when I tell them what it is. But don’t feel bad about this manilla. It never made it into circulation. The ship carrying it to Africa sank before it could be used to buy a human being, and it was recently recovered from the shipwreck. I acquired it as a teaching symbol.”

He went on to tie his story to CES. “Here at CES we are seeing a lot of new, breakthrough technology that can make a real difference in our lives. A lot of entrepreneurs are showcasing the results of their work here at CES. That was also the case in the slave trade. There were many entrepreneurs who stepped up to improve ship technology for getting slaves from Africa to market faster, intact and alive. There were new inventions in insurance and banking as a result of the needs of the slave trade where payments were trans-Atlantic and corporations were multinational, dealing in foreign currencies, and the need to insure individual slaves that might die before reaching market in the terrible conditions of the ships. Actuarial techniques were invented and refined thanks to the slave trade. And a lot of investment money poured in from respectable people, even Sir Isaac Newton. Let’s hope what we are seeing here at CES is only used for Good, and not for evil.”

The name on the man’s badge read, “Wasalu Jaco” but he may be better known as “Lupe Fiasco”. He is a professional rapper with multiple albums. Look him up online, he has an interesting personal background and history. But at CES, he was representing a company called “Zero Mass Water”, one of many offering “off grid” water generators. Basically, you take a dehumidifier and hook it to a solar panel with some air filters and water filters and some plumbing, and you extract water from the air. The premise is that in places where the water supply is disrupted by a natural disaster, or polluted, or just because you want to be completely off the grid and public utilities, this installation can produce clean water. 

Wasalu Jaco is an investor and board member of Zero Mass Water. He went on to introduce the Mayor of Flint, Michigan, the honorable Dr. Karen Weaver. Mayor Weaver was a guest of Zero Mass Water and she stood on their stage and discussed the Flint, Michigan water fiasco for 15 minutes with Wasalu Jaco in support. The point and the connection were obvious – Flint lacks a trusted water supply. Even the local government regulated utility cannot be trusted to provide safe, clean drinking water. Zero Mass Water has a solution.

The fact is that there are many companies like Zero Mass Water who are offering similar products and services, using different technologies to condense water from humid air. It is debatable which system is “best”, and there is further debate as to whether alternative techniques of water purification that start with highly polluted water might offer competitive alternatives to humidity condensation. 

But the point is, Wasalu Jaco is a compelling speaker! His story about the manilla and the slave trade kept the crowd spellbound! Wasalu is highly charismatic, likeable, personable, approachable, and people wanted to support him after hearing his story – the story of a terrible injustice with fallout that continues to plague the world. The crowd was mostly white, some foreign visitors, Asian and other ethnicities, some were young, some were gray-haired. But they all resonated and responded positively to Wasalu Jaco. Whatever Wasalu was selling, the crowd was interested after hearing his story.

What a brilliant marketing move! Bringing in the Mayor of Flint, Michigan to discuss the history of Flint’s water problems, without formally endorsing Zero Mass Water. Brilliant!

It has already been true for quite some time that people want to feel good about the products and services they consume. Green. Responsible. Better if the corporation is charitable and socially responsible. Many for-profit companies give back a portion of their profits to charities. Many corporations encourage their employees to support charities and even grant them paid time-off to participate in charity activities and fund raisers. This too shall increase in the future. But I have to hand it to Zero Mass Water for finding a gifted and talented speaker who touched the hearts of every person in the crowd – including mine – regardless of whatever it may have had to do with the company product and service. Wasalu Jaco’s educational and teachable moment impacted everybody who listened.

I think that we are going to see A LOT more marketing and selling like that. This goes beyond “social network influencers” although it will include them too. People have always struggled with personal identity. Personal fashion has always been a statement of identity. I’m not a sports fan but I recognize what it means to wear a professional team’s jersey as personal fashion – you’re a civilian who supports that team and identifies with that tribe. And sports tribes are a great example of personal identity declarations when there are so many competitors available. Apple products were always about a "hip and cool" tribal identity as opposed to Microsoft (no matter how hard they tried to market themselves differently, Microsoft always meant "function over form"). All luxury brands try to exhibit a persona that promises to improve your personal identity if you use their products. It’s not just a shirt, or a dress, or a purse, or a phone. The logo enhances your personal identity, it makes to smarter, more hip, maybe even richer than you actually are. It’s a statement about your own personal identity.

And as we continue to evolve as a global society, with new generations coming to establish new trends, fighting for recognition, fighting for their own, fresh identity, the trend for a long time now has been away from “prettier, thinner, sexier” and away from “smarter, richer, more successful” towards “more profound, deeper, more human, more righteous, eternal”.

In the future that started a while ago, people will buy whatever presents itself as a cultural movement worthy of following. People will look at a company’s employee base and judge the products and services on employee happiness, employee support, lack of employee class action lawsuits and lack of executive scandals. Look at Uber. 

And they will also buy based on “righteousness-appeal”. What does that company, that product, that service stand for and support outside of and beyond the tangible product or service? You might have the best mousetrap, the most efficient, cheapest, readily available, but if your competitor is “nicer” than you and portrays an image that is more righteous than yours, people will buy the more expensive, less efficient, less reliable mouse trap because they identify with that brand more than yours. Look at Canada. Canadians will always pay more to buy Canadian, and at this point, I don’t blame them! Canadians are in fact nicer and more righteous than most others. (That’s a joke, but it’s true.)

Identity. Who are you? What do you stand for? In the future, the bumper sticker won’t say, “He who dies with the most toys wins”. It will say, “She who left the world better than she found it, who did no harm, who left only footprints and took only pictures, will barely be remembered at all, but will be remembered well.”