Welcome to a new year, a time for reflection, resolutions … and predictions about the future of marketing.
Things are still a little crazy, but after a half-decade of extreme unsettledness, a few clear trends are emerging. Here are 8 good guesses for what marketing will become in the year ahead.
1) Less confusing: It’s been hard to keep up with changes in marketing over the last few years if you weren’t in the business … and harder yet to accept the changes if you were. Tried and true formulas for generating awareness, acquiring leads, making sales and building loyalty, not to mention earning a paycheck, were all failing.
For a while websites were the answer. Then SEO. Then video. Then apps. Then social media. Everything just kind of got tacked on. Strategies became a hash.
But things are coming into focus now. We are getting more comfortable operating in a post-paid media era, where the majority of communication between businesses, customers and influencers happens through user-managed networks. It will take a while yet for many organizations to accept the fact that they need to manage a lot of their media in-house, and staff, train and budget accordingly. And it will take a while for professional services firms to move into more of a counselor role than production role. But this transition is inevitable and well underway across all industries.
2) More intrinsic: Megabus, AirBnB, Buffer and other social businesses are showing us how it is done. One of the best ways to market a product is to design it with the marketing baked in. Megabus, the company that made bus riding cool again, gives away free seats and sells first tickets for $1; a ‘gamified’ business model that triggers social word of mouth. AirBnB, the (marginally legal) service that lets anyone become a DIY hotelier, does almost all its branding via its site, driving people there with super-smart promotions like its Sandy “love in.” Buffer, POSTMKTG’s favorite social queuing tool, builds awareness with guestposts and hooks customers with a well designed high utility freemium application.
3) Less perfectly planned: The words of the year are iterate and agile. Marketing is becoming much less about planning campaigns and more about trying lots of stuff and setting up communication systems and approval processes that make it easy to jump on trends (check out Jeremy Gutsche’s Exploiting Chaos).
4) More participatory: Every person in an organization, every partner of that organization and every one of that organization’s customers, prospects and influencers are now intimately interconnected through technologically-amplified social channels. While our national politics might suggest limits to democratic decision-making, marketing is moving inexorably away from specialization and assembly line production and toward well-managed interaction, project assignment and crowd-sourcing.
5) Less fearful: Let’s go to my favorite video of the year, bravely created by the in-house marketers at Bodyform, a UK feminine hygiene brand owned by the Swedish paper company SCA. A viral success now at 3.5 million views and counting.
6) More playful: Such fun is only for consumer brands you say? Check out this great Pinterest page of Remarkable Content Marketing Finds curated by the German content marketing consultancy KontextB2B.
7) Less like advertising: Bill Lee triggered a lot of noise last August with his provocatively titled Harvard Business Review article, Marketing is Dead. And indeed, the kind of marketing where good product design and excellent customer experience don’t play primary roles, and where the only people authorized to add brand value through storytelling are advertising agency creative directors, is dead.
Thank goodness!
8) More like a real relationship: Okay, maybe there are limits to how transparent an organization should be, how responsive it should be and how playful it can be without coming off as unserious. But we haven’t reached them yet.
Wrapping up: How all these trends ultimately “operationalize” is still quite up in the air. But with the cost of trying new things now so low, businesses and agencies don’t need to wait until everything’s all figured out to start playing.
Have a happy marketing year.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ronald Ladouceur is Principal and Founder at POSTMKTG.
