10 Branding Trends for 2010: Value is the New Black - source: www.marketingcharts.com

Though US economists are cautiously predicting an uptick in consumer spending next year, the post-recession landscape will present brand marketers with new challenges, new engagement realities and new rules, and will increase pressure to prove how and why branded products deliver value, according to (pdf) Dr. Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys. 

Using what Passikoff calls “predictive loyalty metrics” gleaned from consumer data his firm collects,  Brandkeys analyzed the likely consumer values, needs and expectations for the next 12-18 months and offered the following 10 trends:

1. Value is the new black: Consumer spending, even on sale items, will continue to be replaced by a reason-to-buy at all. This may spell trouble for brands with no authentic meaning, whether high-end or low.
2. Brands are increasingly a surrogate for value: What makes goods and services valuable will increasingly be what’s wrapped up in the brand and what it stands for.
3. Brand differentiation is brand value: The unique meaning of a brand will increase in importance as generic
   features continue to propagate in the brand landscape. Awareness as a meaningful market force has long been obsolete, and differentiation will be critical for sales and profitability.
4. “Because I said so” is over: Brand values can be established as a brand identity, but they must believably exist in the mind of the consumer. A brand can’t just say it stands for something and make it so. The consumer will decide, making it more important than ever for a brand to have measures of authenticity that will aid in brand differentiation and consumer engagement.
5. Consumer expectations are growing: Brands are barely keeping up with consumer expectations now. Every day consumers adopt and devour the latest technologies and innovations, and hunger for more. Smarter marketers will identify and capitalize on unmet expectations. Those brands that understand where the strongest expectations exist will be the brands that survive and prosper.
6. Old tricks don’t - and won’t - work anymore: Consumers are on to brands trying to play their emotions for profit. In the wake of the financial debacle of this past year, people are more aware then ever of the hollowness of bank ads that claim “we’re all in this together” when those same banks have rescinded their credit and turned their retirement plan into case studies. The same is true for insincere celebrity pairings - such as Seinfeld & Microsoft or Tiger Woods & Buick. Celebrity values and brand values instead need to be in concert.
7. Consumers won’t need to know a brand to love it: As the buying space becomes even more online-driven and international (and uncontrolled by brands and corporations), front-end awareness will become less important. A brand with the right street credibility can go viral in days, with awareness following -  not leading - the conversation.
8. It’s not just buzz: Conversation and community is increasingly important, and if consumers trust the community, they will extend trust to the brand. This means not just word of mouth, but the right word of mouth within the community. This has significant implications for future of customer service.
9. Consumers talk with each other before talking with brands: Social networking and exchange of information outside of the brand space will increase. This - at least in theory - will mean more opportunities for brands to get involved in these spaces and meet customers where they are.
10. Engagement is not a fad; It’s the way today’s consumers do business: Marketers will come to accept that there are four engagement methods: The platform (TV; online), the context (program; webpage), the message (ad or communication), and the experience (store/event). At the same time, they also will realize that brand engagement will become impossible using out-dated attitudinal models.

Passikoff believes that accommodating all of these trends will require some companies to undergo significant paradigm shifts, which will likely be painful but necessary.  Either way, change in the brand marketing pace will be inevitable.  “Whether a brand does something about it or not, the future is where it’s going to spend the rest of its life. How long that life lasts is up to the brand, determined by how it responds to today’s reality,” he said.

Recent research from Penn State University found that one in five Tweets is brand related, and appears to support the belief that there is an increasing desire for brand engagment and customer service on more community-based media.
Another study from Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, similarly proclaims that “value is the new black,” predicting that post-recession shoppers will transform into “value hunters” as they look for true value and meaning from brands, rather than just discounts.

Top 10 Integrated Marketing Trends: Beware of Hyper focus

As 2009 hurtles to a close and marketers gear up for an undoubtedly leaner and meaner year in 2010, they will need to be increasingly vigilant about managing integrated programs with fewer resources, more diversity and less certainty, according to Judy Franks, founder and president of The Marketing Democracy.

Despite these constraints, Franks still believes that if the industry can begin to look at the media landscape as a whole and less at its parts, and understand the ways in which it is changing, 2010 can still be the “year of the good idea.”

Using data and observations gleaned from recent consulting projects and a extensive industry-watching, Franks compiled the following top 10 trends to help integrated marketers navigate the choppy waters she expects to see in 2010.
The top 10 trends for integrated marketers:

1. Less will get done until we learn to do more with less: While the year 2009 was marked by extreme economic turmoil, the marketing industry won’t feel its full effects until 2010. Right now, marketers and their agency partners are focused on simply “getting work out the door,” with  reduced headcounts and budgets. However, if they learn to align resources with more singular and powerful integrated marketing programs - at the perhaps necessary expense of individual marketing tactics -  the breakthrough ideas and greater productivity will be the norm again.
2. Marketers will mistakenly ‘whack’ a medium of the marketing mix: With reduced marketing budgets, Franks said, “something has to give.”  Unfortunately, marketers are making wholesale cuts to specific marketing/media channels in the process. Though the most dramatic cuts have occurred this year in newspapers and magazines, she cautions marketers to carefully consider if other media in the marketing mix can really compensate for these cuts, especially in terms of the consumer behavior.  Though Franks believes that reduced resources should not affect a well-crafted, integrated, multi-channel mix, she does expect that such blunders may occur in 2010.
3. Marketers rush to employ ’social networking’ strategies: Marketers are in what Franks calls “a mad rush” to enter the social networking space with ‘tweets’, ‘widgets’, ‘apps’ and ‘fan pages’. However, she asserts that social networking is not, in itself, a marketing tactic; nor is it a surrogate for a brand’s social experience or a line item on a marketing plan, a specific channel, or a form of content. In Franks’s view, social media is an outcome, and no single channel has a lock on the ’social’ nature of content. Rather than scrambling for social media programs, Franks cautions marketers to step back and realize that “most any medium can serve as the ‘originating’ medium in a journey that can take a great piece of content across channels and into vast networks of hearts and minds.”
4. More data but even less ‘understanding’: Web analytics are making online campaigns easier to measure, while more studies are emerging from more sources - including media measurement companies, foundations, academics, marketers and the media themselves. While all this data clearly point to a highly fluid, highly interactive and mercurial media landscape, these data sets are - at the same time - less projective when the media world changes so quickly. So, while marketers may have a better understanding of what happened last week, last month or yesterday, they cannot take this understanding too far into the future. In this respect, Franks likens today’s environment to  a “Wild West” era of integrated channel planning.
5. Lines between media will continue to blur: In the coming year, more prime-time TV content will show up in more places than ever before. Fans will have multiple access points into shows that used to be an ‘appointment view’ controlled by network programming executives. Such models as live view, live+3 day views from a DVR, video on demand, Hulu, network owned websites, and shared distribution deals (ala DirecTV and NBC for Friday Night Lights) it is no longer clear as to where one screen medium ends and another begins. Marketers will do best to understand that “it’s all a screen,” and plan accordingly, Franks said.
6. Push vs. pull will become less relevant: In 2010, the classification of marketing experiences into ‘push’ vs. ‘pull’ will become less relevant because the best content (both programming and commercial content) will increasingly become ‘push’ and ‘pull’ at the same time. For example,  American Idol is both a ‘push’ medium because it’s broadcast during primetime on Fox, and a ‘pull’ medium because of the plethora of votes, downloads, and chats which result from the broadcast.  The reverse is also true. Given the vast reach of social networks, a viral experience that is pulled along by a small group of fans will quickly amass reach without too much effort on the part of the original sender.
7. Great content will travel at the ’speed of share’  while ‘average’ experiences will evaporate: In 2010, marketers will continue to wrestle with a sense of time because messages can travel at ‘the speed of share’ which renders the speed of traditional content distribution obsolete. With the click of a mouse, or a mobile phone, consumers can advance a great story/ad/video/picture/newsbite to vast, ‘networked’ communities of hearts and minds. However, content will only travel at the ’speed of share’ if it is worth sharing in the first place. There now is much lower tolerance for mediocre content, and consumers in 2010 will have even more means of disposing of, and/or avoiding it.
8. The adult 18-49 demo will become even less relevant as a target cohort: Though the diversity within the 18-49 adult demographic isn’t new, the dramatic differences in media use and consumption for an 18 year-old relative to a 49 year-old are becoming increasingly pronounced.  The great divide between internet-raised and television-raised consumers may indeed become big enough in 2010 for integrated marketers to finally realize that this broad and unrealistic target cohort doesn’t hold up.
9. Symbiosis will create interesting and - at times strange - partnerships: Though many forecasters are predicting wholesale collapses in media channels, Franks believes that the media and marketing landscape will be affected more by the laws of symbiosis than the laws of natural selection. As an example, the relationship between YouTube and TV - which at first appeared on the surface as a competing interest - continues to evolve into a symbiotic relationship. These emerging relationships will continue to develop among what appear on the surface as competing media channels.
10. 2010 will become the year of the good idea:  The recent past suggests that integrated marketing, as an industry, has become hyper- focused on the dynamics of channels to such an extreme that it has taken its eye off the ball. However, when a collective realization is made that marketing channels serve only as pipelines for content and that only great content can be both ‘pushed’ and ‘pulled’ along at the new ‘ speed of share’, the good ideas will begin to flow again. Without a good idea, the content will simply evaporate.

Source: www.marketingcharts.com

<Close Window>