I am not a big fan of buzz words. These kind of marketing words that you hear during agency meetings and who impress (they think) the clients. Millenials, for example is one of these words. Too much used without even knowing what it exactly means. Well, I have another one today – phygital. But at this time I still didn’t find a better term to qualify a real trend and a guenine expertise.
Literally – physical and digital – , this not-at-all rocket science terminology, focus on a strategy recipe joining the worlds of online and offline. Phygital strategy joins the best of both worlds…
At the crossing of online and offline
You can already find on the internet a bunch of articles talking about this, even it’s still a little bit confidential – but I just want to share here my expertise and concrete experience, because Phygital is a true reality with real examples. Behind this suitcase-word you have a lot to play with: digital, social media, field and experiential marketing, phygital is a mix of different mediums. If I needed to resume the idea, of concept of phygital I will use this sentence that I particularly like:
“The goal of online dating is to get offline as quickly as possible.”
First, I love the fact that these words are making reference to the online dating apps, and indirectly the dating apps. Tinder, Grindr or others applications are perfect laboratories to try and test new kind of content marketing, ads or interactivity to implement with consumers – secondly, it reflects a clear example of what is phygital – you are using digital as a tool to have “benefits” in the real world, the offline world.
The phygital recipe
You have different examples where phygital strategies can be used:
- Digital or social media campaign mixed with a field or experiential activation
- Interactive brand activation
- e-shop strategies – research online & purchase offline
- ePR and influencers campaign
- Advertising and brand/product activation
- …
Phygital is more the joint venture of different competences, a sort of recipe rather than a “ready-to-use” strategy. This is clearly a below the line segment that force all the parties, clients and agencies to work out of the marketing silo as they do very often.
Everybody need to work together, in a coherent horizontal way from the beginning of the project, to try in the best way to implement the best of both worlds in the strategy – online and offline.
… but not only for e-shopping
The mistake would be to take the phygital aspect literally, and only use it for e-retail or shop. I am really convinced that the trend is that people want to feel, touch, try, experiment – and live experiences on their online life but also on their offline life. I love digital, I live digital, I feel digital but I was born in a real world with real people.
And I never feel so alive that when I can do experiences coming from the both worlds. I had the chance to work on both digital and experiential agencies, and maybe that’s thanks to this that I was able to realise the power of online and offline – and most of all the power when the both are reunited.