Humans discover fire to cook meat.
The caveman exits his cave, spear in tow, on his way to bag a meal for his family. A few hours later, he returns with his prize, a small hog or a fish, and some berries and roots he picked up along the way.
Apart from the obvious modern-day benefit of working off his meal, there was a fair amount of effort to eat involved here to get the food back to his family!
Humans discover farming things.
Following from that, I’m more of a digital expert than a historian so forgive me if this isn’t accurate, but the next thing humans did was discover how to grow and harvest during the early Stone Age. This allowed us to expand as a civilization by producing food at scale, allowing us to eat more, and grow more.
Humans harness technology for food.
Humans have employed machines to ever increasingly do their dirty work. From water-powered grain-mills of Asia minor, through to our modern day vastly computerised and modernised mills of present day, humans have harnessed machines and technology to produce more food quicker.
THE NEXT STEP: The Internet is creating stronger direct connections between humans and brands
With the advent of the Internet, we no longer needed to rely on mainstream media streamed to us via a TV, radio, periodical or newspaper - we suddenly had a direct connection to one another (and brands).
The direct connection that that Internet has been providing has been strengthening and strengthening since the late 90s, first with webpages, then blogs, then social media - coming in a variety of forms and now dominant tech super powers (Facebook, Google et al).
The owners of the new channels that allow humans and brands to directly connect with one another yield so much power that they are making countries and politics irrelevant to some degree (take currency vs bitcoin as an example) and someday they may even replace the power that countries currently yield on society (who knows!).
Testing ultimate outcomes with the economic concept of perfect information
In economics, perfect information (sometimes referred to as "no hidden information") is a feature of perfect competition. With perfect information in a market, all consumers and producers have perfect and instantaneous knowledge of all market prices, their own utility, and own cost functions.
While we live in a world of imperfect information as consumers are exposed to a lot of information but still have difficulty summarising and deciding based on information, we are rapidly moving more and more to a world of perfect information.
On an evolutionary scale, the path to perfect information has been lightning quick, and we’ve seen direct connections to customers become more and more frictionless… and friction-free experiences are key to customers buying directly from brands
UX, Social Media, COVID and a change in consumer habits.
The perfect storm to create the ideal direct to consumer D2C experience.
The western world has been on the D2C path for some time now, with more and more brands recognising the benefits of selling directly to consumers through their own direct channels.
Customer habits have changed
With customers being locked down for so long, we’re much more likely to purchase something online now in March 2021 than we were this time last year, in March 2020, and that because their purchasing habits have changed... permanently.
Brands now have the tools available to adapt quickly to change with digital capabilities
Brands usually fulfilling their sales through wholesale B2B channels are now able to fulfil sales through directly B2C digital channels like their own websites, Instagram, Facebook, and more without the wholesaler cut.
This has seen a huge increase in B2C brands
Distributing and selling food: Technology has enabled the evolution of local, regional, national and then international distribution and sales of food
In ancient times, sales were largely completed at a local-level, where local producers sold to local people, but as the wheel was invented, local sales moved to regional due to horse-drawn carts, and goods were distributed across the region.
With the introduction of trains and barges, we saw much freer movement of goods across a nation, and ships, trains and aeroplanes enabled international freer movement of goods.
Now with direct to consumer, are we seeing a different type of free movement?
A type of movement that is near instantaneous, where with the click of a button, consumers can now get something delivered to them within the hour (or within 1-2 days) fulfilling consumer needs directly and instantaneously?
The future is direct connections, and exactly what you want, now.