Marketing Trends 2013

Forbes 2013 Marketing Trends

• Selective and smarter social media.
• Simple—simplify customers' life and experience
• Real-time marketing through social media & websites. Consumer-based timeline.
• Mobile.

FastCo Create

• era of integration and simplification as people/consumers want coherence, impact, joy, and help from people running brands
• a higher ideal that is activated beautifully and completely in what you do.
• We’ve become both reliant upon and indulgent of our need for social validation. We continue to fish for “likes," we hoard birthday wishes, we feign photographic skill for love, and we relish the feeling of disseminating newly discovered content to our networks. Clearly this behavior is here to stay, but I believe a new wave toward private validation is beginning to take hold. New data, tools, sites, apps, and devices are tracking our activity and accomplishments and making us better, even when nobody’s looking.
  
  Our rewards are simply digital--purposefully designed to monitor our improvement and keep us hunting for even the most “valueless” points, badges, progress bars, levels, and trophies. In the beginning, such rewards felt superfluous, with digital farm crops and check-in badges yielding little return on engagement. But this new wave of private rewards will continue to shape the way we live, learn, exercise, and improve. Make no mistake, in 2013 and beyond, brands will continue to find ways to fuel the need for social validation. But the true game changers will be those that go a layer deeper with the data and tools to make us better behind closed doors, even without a “like.”
  —Zach Foster, strategy director, Droga5.
• respect people’s private spaces.
• Brands for Betterment: With 18-34-year-olds continuing to demonstrate an unprecedented interest in working as a community to improve our society and environment, and a fractious government unable to make meaningful changes.
• customer-first philosophy that dictates you deliver marketing consumers value, and b) It can--and must--be measured in terms of creating behavioral changes such as increasing consideration and, yes, sales.
• people want to be in their own story, while brands keep telling their own stories through advertising masquerading as storytelling.
  
  To create new forms of interaction between brands, people, technology, and culture, we need to understand a product’s and brand’s ability to open up a rich narrative space where people can enter as protagonists, not just consumers. We need to think about people as protagonists in a narrative that brand and product can help inspire and co-prototype, rather than treating people as consumers of brand and product meaning.
  
  When people are protagonists in narrative experience, they are interested in alternative functions, unusual experiences, complicated pleasures that fulfill more subtle psychological needs and open up new behaviors and new meanings. We have to unleash a product’s ability to provide new behavioral possibilities.
  
  We are entering a period of more poetic agendas of technology because people want to engage in more alternatives, in another interpretation of reality.
  We need a new breed of mutant and meta-products to make the experience of our connected world more magical.
• disconnecting more from the online and reconnecting more in the offline. There is a great new acronym that’s the antithesis of FOMO: JOMO. Joy of Moving On. This idea says it is okay to not be consuming in real time all of the time.
  
  
  Media can and should play an important role in helping brands embrace this: More fun. More touch. More play. More curiosity. More connection.
• brands adopting honest approaches to marketing.
• Mobile: We should be thinking on how to create mini-moments rather than ads.