14 New Marketing Trends Poised to Change the World
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14 Trends 1 Directness
Customers demand to be heard. At one time, that was difficult because were so many layers between any organization and its custoners, but this is no longer the case. There is no longer any insulation. Companies can speak directly to individual customers through today’s communication technologies.
The challenge for companies is how to organize the thousands of motivated customers who want to communicate into a profit center. The obvious way to do that is to reverse the traditional marketing dynamic. At one time, companies would spend thousands of dollars trying to reach potential customers through TV ads, print ads and so forth. That was the PR era of dominance, where everybody wanted to be on Oprah or advertise during the Super Bowl.
Savvy companies today are reversing that dynamic. Instead of trying to reach more people by advertising, these companies are consolidating their customers’ opinions into new product ideas. They are then creating better products they already know their existing customers will buy because they have had a havd in designing them.
This is the ultimission marketing as opposed to interruption marketing. Thday’s smart marketers are hard at work building a “permission asset” for their organizations–a pool of customers who welcome communication from the company. These companies earn the privilege of delivering personal messages to just the people who want to get them. This is a far more calm and patient approach to marketing, and it’s one that actually works rather than the usual scattergun adver-tise-it-and-they-will-buy approach which used to work in the past.
14 Trends 2 Amplification
Today, every customer can amplify their opinions. In effect, everyone is a critic. It’s urgent, therefore, to create products that satisfy your critics. This holds true not only for purchase transactions but also for after-sales service and support.
Since time immemorial, mass marketers have ignored individual customers. They have been fobbed off with “That’s our policy” ad infinitum. Consumers today have the tools to fight back with. If a customer receives lousy service, he or she can up a Website and get the message out to everyone who uses the Internet.
This is why blogs matter. Blogs convert readers and those who view them into active participants in the ongoing discussion. Blogs are now supplemented by video clips on YouTube. All of this represents a fundamental change in the way marketing should happen.
Pure and simple, blogs are a personal publishing platform. There are already more than 80 million blogs worldwide covering every topic imaginable, and more are coming into existence every day. Blogs appeal because they are people talking in their real voice rather than being sanitized by the corporate PR department.
Many companies think of sales as a funnel where attention goes in at the top and orders come out at the bottom. It’s time to flip the funnel on its side. Give your customers a megaphone. Make it easy for them to have and express an opinion about what you have to offer. Do this and your existing customers can become the best marketing asset you have available.
14 Trends 3 Authenticity
Consumers today can find out about your organization from a variety of sources, not just your own marketing materials. As a result, authenticity reigns supreme. You can’t say one thing and then do something entirely different without suffering the consequences.
It is very easy for comeone to follow you around with a video camera and document what you do and then upload it to YouTube. If you say one thing but then end up doing something entirely different, people will find you out. This is the fundamental difference between the Internet business era and those that have preceded it. Bad or potentially embarrassing news can travel far and wide today.
All of this helps consumers differetiate between what’s real and what’s fake. Even when there is a subtle disconnect between what you say and what happens in reality, people notice and vote with their wallets. The other point to keep in mind is that the Internet never forgets. Once a customer has posted an unfavorable item about your company, it’s there for keeps. Search engines are equally adept at finding articles that were posted a few hours ago as they are at finding what was written many years ago. There is a shared institutional memory to the Internet that is very far-reaching and pervasive.
When everyone in your company from the top to the bottom believes and more importantly lives the values you espouse, you create a thoroughly authentic story that will resonate with potential customers. You also make it easy for the story to spread far and wide. A good example of this phenomena is a company called Patagonia, which makes coats used by climbers. This company reduces, reuses and recycles with a passion, and comes up with numerous ways to give back to the environment. The company’s organic cotton shirts sell for ten times more than comparable nonorganic shirts, and yet the company does extremely well.
For Patagonia customers, the shirt becomes more than mere clothing. It’s a way for wealthy consumers to tell a story about themselves and their personal priorities. It’s a tangible way for consumers to show they care about the environment and are willing to put their money where their mouth is. That’s what authenticity can do.
14 Trends 4 Simplicity
The inevitable consequence of more clutter is that consumers today have short attention spans. Complex messages can’t get through the absolute deluge of interruptions. To be persuasive, keep everything you say short and to the point.
Very few consumers today will sit down and read all 1,296 pages of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. They are more likely to watch a YouTube video clip for about ten seconds, and then if the clip has not captured their attention, they will move on to something else. After all, there are more than 7 million (and growing) clips to choose from, so life’s too short to waste watching something that is uninteresting or boring.
Consumers nowadays face an absoluto deluge of interruption marketing: messages calling for their attention. The natural and obvious flow-on effect of this that to be heard, you have to cut to the chase quickly. Every interaction with a potential customer is a make-or-break proposition. There isn’t time to move down the learning curve. You need to overcome any initial discomfort and move into the delivery of value quickly or all is lost.
The only way you can achieve that is by simplifying what you’re trying to say. This is reflected in television advertising. Commercials used to be one or two minutes long. Then people came up with the idea of running two per minute, then four. Today it’s common for radion ads to be only three to five seconds long.
Online, people know they’ve got to move quickly to survive. If your classified ad doesn’t sound perfect within the first sentence or two, consumers glance at the next ad without hesitation or regret. After all, there are often more than 20,000 or 30,000 ads to get through, so consumers know they have to be quick.
The other point of note is that it’s easier than ever to sell anything you like. Outsourcing is now so well established that if you want to enter just about any industry, you can with just a little cash. Companies exist to do every back office task that’s required with often awe inspiring efficiency. The days where only a few well funded corporations could do things are long gone. So too is the place of complex advertising.
14 Trends 5 Choices
The domination of a few hit products in most markets is fading. Instead, consumers today tend to favor the entities that provide the most choices. Focus on giving customers the ability to choose and you’ll be aligned with this growing phenomena.
Over an extended period of time, very few free markets consolidate around one or two leaders. Instead, most markets tend to break into a lot of small niches. It’s clear that humans like choice and the more choices there are, the more revenue there is to spread around.
The fact consumers that have a bias for greater choice will not not be a surprise. More is usually better for everone involved. Consumers like choice because it allows them to express themselves as individuals. Producers are becoming more comfortable about making many choices available because technology is making it easier for customized goods to be made. There are also tools around (like search engines) that specialize in helping consumers find what’s out there.
So what’s the way to prosper in this kind of environment? There are three challenges:
1. Identify an emerging market: a small fragment of some mass market where people are linked by a shared passion or obsession for something.
2. Create something genuinely remarkable that will appeal to consumers in that niche: something so awe-inspiringly good that not only will some people rave about you but others will feel compelled to find you. They’ll also feel equally driven to tell everyone they know about you as well.
3. String together enough of these markets until you have a business: and then start making additional products that you know your existing customers will love. Making additional products won’t be hard–almost anything you can imagine can be outsourced today. Digital products in particular can be customized and stored ad infinitum. Digital technology also makes it easy for nondigital products to be customized. Figure out some savvy ways to blend these kinds of technology together in making follow-on products.
14 Trends 6 Outsourcing
Be very deliberate about what you choose to do yourself and what you outsource. Today, the means of production for anything is based on talent and efficiency much more than it is on geography. Outsource anything and everything that is repetitive.
Whenever you buy something, chances are pretty good that you’re actually not buying from the person or company you think. Instead, you’re probably buying from their supplier who is producing to the plans supplied them. Almost every industry is now being forced to outsource everything to save time and money.
Outsourcing applies with equal relevance to marketing. When you have no factory to keep busy, it’s easy to be innovative and fast-moving. You can change tack quickly. Instead of keeping your factory workers gainfully employed, you can focus on keeping your market busy.
In a commercial world where outsourcing is readily available, there are logically only two paths successful organizations can follow:
Outsourcing;
1. Take every repetitive task and either outsource it to someone else or mechanize it
2. Inject into every potentially repetitive task something unique and valuable
If whatever you do to earn money is repetitive and follows a set process, then it’s always going to be more effective to outsource it to someone more efficient than you are. On the other hand, to keep jobs, find ways to inject insights, initiative and judgment into the tasks your organization does in-house. Give the people who do that task for you the freedom and the incentives to do things that cannot be codified or automated. This is the only feasible way to offset the outsourcing imperative now found in all industries.
14 Trends 7 Pick-and-Choose
Bundling products together into solutions has been the way of doing business for a generation or more. That has changed now. Instead of end-to-end solutions, people want components they can configure themselves. This requires a major rethink.
In many ways, the online search engines (Google, Yahoo! and others) have broken the world of commerce into tiny bits. People are getting more and more used to searching for the specific items they want and purchasing just those instead of buying a complete system.
This has some interesting flow-on results:
Individually, any one of these ideas can have a profound effect on how a business is set up and runs, but when combined together, this represents a seismic shift in the commercial landscape.
Quite simply, the bundling era is dead and buried. Pick-and-choose or mix-and-match now reigns supreme. Any business that is based around bundling information, product lines or shelf space opportunities is going to struggle to survive. Different kinds of businesses will earn the best rewards.
14 Trends 8 Chaos
Now forms of publishing, communication and interaction are being developed all the time. You have to find practical ways to benefit from all this chaos–perhaps by embedding the marketing in the product. Otherwise, you’ll only end up trying to fight the trend and lose.
At one time (during the golden age of TV advertising), it was possible to pay money to get everyone to notice your product. A few people would then buy–the challenge was to make that buyers circle as large as possible.
Today, there’s an explosion of media choices. It’s now feasible to deliver your just to those who are predisposed to buy.
Due to the fact that you can be more selective, advertising becomes much more cost effective today. Instead of offering a generic product in order to generate enough sales to pay for expensive advertising, you can develop specialized products that are then pitched at a tiny slice of the market who you know are passionate about your product or service.
In many ways, every time someone does a search on Google, they are creating their own personalized channel of communication that you can access through Google AdWords or other similar technologies. Instead of mass marketing, incredibly targeted and personalized marketing is coming to the fore. That requires organizations to learn new skills and develop new competencies in order to thrive in this new environment.
14 Trends 9 Networks
As various consumer-to-consumer networks grow, more consumers will naturally gravitate towards them. Not only will their word-of-mouth recommendations become more influential, but they will start to pressure producers for what they want.
Once upon a time, to sell something, you’d need to:
Today, you just place an as on eBay and you’re done. Something that you start selling as a hobby can turn into a business if it does well enough. Plus, it makes no difference whether you live in the middle of New York City or in Alaska. The interconnected world is tailor made for everyone to do business.
eBay has empowered hundreds of thousands of people to become entrepreneurs, but this is not the only tool there is. Some people are successfully combining a MySpace page and a blog to build an online business. CafePress. com is another resource sith that allows individuals to bulid and run their own customized online storefronts for a minimal investment. Amazon. com offers a comparable service on its Website
As more and more companies start offering the back office support functions required, it will continue to get progressively easier for anyone and everyone to have their own business. As social networks become more powerful and consumers inform each other about their experiences, huge blocks of purchasers will come together. These people will not only group together, but they will also start pressuring organizations to provide more of what they do want and less of what they don’t.
Marketing has always about discovering what people want and need, and telling them a story about how they can get it from you. The most important thing that has changed is the ability of consumers to be treated with respect and to be connected to other people.
–Seth Godin
14 Trends 10 Scarcity
Most companies are based on exploiting scarcity as a way to gener ate profits. In the coming years, what was scarce will become common and vice-versa. You’d better adjust what you do to take these role reversals into account if you want to stay afloat.
Consider what used to be scarce in the good old days:
Now consider what used to be abundant back then:
To put it bluntly, the scarcity model of business has flipped. What used to be scarce and therefore of value is now readily available because of better communication technologies. What used to be abundant is now in high demand and is therefore valued in today’s world.
Companies that set up their entire operations to exploit scarcity have to likewise flip their business models if they are to succeed today. Having an expensive storefront in downtown New York City is no longer a guarantee of success when customers can go online and track down a much wider selection of goods to purchase. To survive, that store operator is going to have to change his or her business model. Instead of offering access to hard-to-find goods, he’d better do things that save customers time. He’d better create events customers will love so much they will pay an entry fee to attend. If those kinds of changes are not mads, there’s no way a scarcity-based business can survive thday. It’s a case of adapt or become extinct.
14 Trends 11 Big Ideas
In a factory setting, small incremental improvements are valued. To make an impact in today’s noisy marketplace, however, something bigger is required. You need to make bold leaps forward. Force people to sit up and take notice if you aspire to get ahead.
Nobody doubts that the marketplace is becoming progerssively noisier. What’s needed are big ideas–the kinds of things that generate attention and awareness. If you make only a very small step forward, those minor gains will get lost in the background noise. You must have a “big idea” to stand out.
Big ideas can really only come from two directions:
Big idea
You can have a product that is so in sync with the times it is an obvious winner
You can develop breakthrough advertising that makes you stand out
At one time, big ideas in advertising dominated. If you could come up with something that resonated with consumers–Charlie the Tuna or the milk mustache–you had a great punch line and the opportunity to make good money. Today, advertising-based big idead big ideas really don’t excel. There’s just too much competition for attention. In the marketplace that now exists, the best big ideas are embedded into the user experience. The BlackBerry is a perfect example of this.
Companies that reached market leadership through older generation marketing usually got there through competitive advantages like better manufacturing or distribution. They then tried to leverage those advantages for as long as possible. Today, by contrast, distribution is much easier to organize, and manufacturing can be a hindrance rather than an advantage. Market leaders can be hit hard by big ideas whose time has come. To move forward, develop a big idea which resonates with the marketplace and push that idea for all its worth. Get ahead with brainpower rather than manufactuing or distribution muscle.
14 Trends 12 Customize
Marketing has always been about size, about “how many” people get reached. That’s no longer relevant. Instead, it’s becoming more important to gauge “who” is being reached. Technology is making it possible to do precision marketing.
Traditional marketers have always had an obsession with size. In this way of thinking:
New Marketing suggests that pitching a message to a huge audience and generating a minuscule response rate isn’t really the way to go. Instead, you’re far better off knowing who is responding to an ad or visiting your Website and then providing that person with a tailored offer they wil be naturally inclined to accept.
The emphasis on “who” rather than “how many” can be illustrated by comparing an ad in a magazine with something like Google AdWords. When a traditional marketer places an ad in Car and Driver, he is reaching a readership of roughly a million people. He is hoping of that total, perhaps a few thousand wil have a suppressed desire to buy what’s offered and will be suitably motivated to make a purchase.
A New Marketer, by contrast, will instead pay Google two dollars a person to place onscreen ads whenever a person does a search for something very specific. The New Marketer might end up only getting 50 leads, but those people have demonstrated that right at this moment they are focused on thinking about the topic they have searched. Those 50 strong leads are far more likely to buy in the immediate future than the few thousand who responded to the magazine ad.
Traditional advertising was all about interrupting people in the hope that once people hear about your product, they will be amazed and will therefore want to buy. New Marketig focuses on identifying the smaller number of people who are ready to act immediately and then getting them to spread the word to their friends friends and acquaintances. You stop pushing stuff and instead get everyone to become enthusiastic evangelists for what you have to offer. That’s a better way to work.
14 Trends 13 Diversity
At one time, it was widely recognized that the rich were very different from the rest of the market, making marketing to them easy. That distinction has dissolved. Today’s rich consumers are diverse. There are more wealthy people than before and they do more things.
The traditional bell curve looked something like this:
The large hump in the middle was the mass market–average products at good prices. A few consumers wanted the cheapest products regardless of quality and a roughly equal number were willing to pay more for premium products.
The new reality of the marketplace is now more like this:
At the cheap end of the market are the discount stores. If people don’t care much about a product, they want the cheapest. At the other end are the ultra-expensive products. Consumers are seciding which products they so care about and they are then splashing out to buy the very best offerings in that category. This phenomenon is happening right across the entire spectrum of products. The market is rapidly diverging into low-end and high-end products, with nothing in the middle.
The consequence of this is that if you offer something in the middle, you end up being over-priced or under-exclusive. Consumers aren’t buying the mid-range products anymore, at least not in the numbers they used to.
Consequently, it’s deadly foe a business to be caught somewhere in the middle of the market. You’re going to be far better off moving to the high or low end of the market and doing whatever it takes to excel there. At least that way you’re targeting markets that are sizable and therefore sustainable.
14 Trends 14 Gatekeepers
The media used to be the gatekeeper for the mass market. To reach them, you had to pay the going rate. That’s true no more. There are no gatekeepers. Everyone is reachable via the Internet. All you have to do is be authentic and genuine.
The newspaper industry has always relied on the PR industry for hints and clues on what to print. There was an “old boy” network in place–if you knew someone who worked at a major media oulet, you could get positive articles printed about whatever you were trying to sell.
That cosy relationship has gone the way of the dinosaur. Today, word spreads far more organically:
The Web is different because it’s so vast that there’s always plenty of stuff for people to write about and talk about. Everything is connected, so that means stories can float from one person to another without any friction or costs getting in the way.
Blogs are an important part of the Wab now. The fact that bloggers aren’t paid for what they do should not be underestimated. It means these people are passionate about what they do. They aren’t merely punching the clock.
So how exactly do you go about marketing through the new gatekeepers? You have to take a long-term view:
In other words, working without gatekeepers is a process and a longterm relationship rether than something that is accomplished with a quick press release. In the new marketplace, everyone is approachable. If you try to abuse that accessibility by spamming people, you’ll get newhere. Build the relationship first and your credibility will pave the way to move forward.
Smart organizations are investing time and energy into transforming their assets. They know that the New Marketing is more than a hot topping. Instead, they use New Marketing to dig deep, to redefine what they actully do to all value. The good news is that you don’t have to start from scratch. In fact, existing organizations have significant advantages. The challenge is that you have to be willing to become an organization that is n sync with the New Marketing.
–Seth Godin
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