Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jason Wallis, CTO of Mozu (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What do you see as the main driver of that consumer-driven purchase cycle? Is it more the community and the people in their network who influence the purchase decision or is it that self-serving content that people read about? Whether it’s on the site of the retailer or other sites, there’s also a lot of content that people are self-serving right now. Between the two, which one is impacting purchase decisions more these days?

Jason Wallis: Both of them impact purchase decisions whether it’s deliberate or not. Sometimes, it depends on the item. If it’s to showcase a luxury item, they may actually directly engage with their social network to get lot more opinions and feedback. If it’s a more casual purchase item, that might not be a strong sentiment. Content is involved in all of those decisions.

What we’ve seen is there’s certainly value served by retailers which is technical in nature, but final decisions are usually driven by community-provided or user-generated content. Content is pretty pervasive throughout the whole purchase cycle. People trust their networks and their friends—birds of a feather flock together. Those are two pretty strong forces that really help shape how people buy, when they buy and what they buy.

Sramana Mitra: What do you see as long-term industry trends?

Jason Wallis: It’s really tough to predict precisely what it’s going to be. Five years ago, I wonder if people would have predicted exactly how strongly this mobile revolution would be impacting everyone. I think that trend of adoption of technology and making shopping more convenient and more integrated in every moment of someone’s life is going to continue. That is going to bring new modalities, new user experiences, and new interfaces to the forefront. That’s very much the continued evolution of the mobile trend.

There’s certainly going to be additional interaction mechanisms with VR. How quickly is that going to infuse into commerce? I know, for a fact, it will. I’m not quite sure when it’s going to get there. The third thing, which has received a lot of media attention lately, is machine learning and AI and having much more intelligent automated interactions between consumers and brands. That will be another way that folks will be able to scale their operations and deliver more relevant, more timely content.

Sramana Mitra: What are some potential entrepreneurial ideas that are on your radar that you might be able to point our aspiring entrepreneurs to work on?

Jason Wallis: Whenever there’s that dissonance created between, in this case, a rapidly evolving landscape that consumers are providing and technology landscape that retailers are able to capitalize on, there’s always friction and opportunity created in those spaces. I don’t really have very specific ideas, but I think anything that makes it more efficient for a brand to provide the ability to purchase relevant customer-facing content is going to be a technology that is going to be snatched up by retailers all over the world.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Thanks for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jason Wallis, CTO of Mozu
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