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Trends provide powerful answers to the huge question you’re wrestling with: ‘what will my customers want next?' And if we have one secret, it’s the counter-intuitive insight at the heart of our trend methodology. To anticipate what your customers will want next, don’t simply ask them (faster horses anyone? ;). Don’t feel you have to study them obsessively (who has the time or money to do that these days anyway?). And don’t just crunch their data (no matter how ‘big’ your data, it’s best used for validation and optimization rather than to inspire truly disruptive leaps). Instead, look at the innovations – new products, services, campaigns and more – that consumers are lavishing attention on now. Yes, that’s right. The key to actionable foresight lies in looking at the overwhelming onslaught of innovations that now whiz past our eyes and across our screens every day....
Watch for growth of AI personal assistants, connected living and global isolationism and more.
Via Marc Wachtfogel, Ph.D.
This is the time of year people post their prognostications for the next year. The predictions will be … predictable: More video! More Snapchat! More podcasts!
Well, OK. It’s pretty easy to make a prediction based on what’s already happening. But there are less obvious tectonic forces rumbling through our marketplace. Here’s a view of some of the underlying shifts, the marketing mega trends, you need be considering in 2017....
Recent figures from Gartner suggest that there will be some 30 billion web-connected devices globally by 2020 and, while this presents fantastic opportunities for marketers, our focus should be on the customer and not on the latest piece of shiny new technology, according to Barry Smith, senior consultant for Ikano Insight.
Poorly used technology could simply result in disengagement not only from communications, but from the brand altogether.
So how can you ensure that your brand is using technology to deliver the most relevant and timely communications in order to drive your customers to spend more, spend more often, and remain engaged? Ikano Insight offers the following ten tips for using technology to increase customer engagement and loyalty...
The digital marketing industry is experiencing a major transformation.
The current state of digital is directly tied to data. Data are everywhere, informing marketers about audience interests, consumer intent, and device activity.
As mobile use continues to increase and media is progressively being bought programmatically, consumers expect a seamless and entertaining online experience.
With marketers and their agencies well underway with planning for the year ahead, here are a few trends that likely will be top of mind in 2015...
While most of what will happen in the future may be a surprise, I believe that there are a lot of things that will happen in the media and marketing industry in the near future that aren’t that hard to predict -- certain things so likely to occur, they are almost inevitable. In fact, you could view them as near certainties.
Why try to predict the future when you’re almost certain to be wrong on many points? If you are trying to prepare for -- or exploit -- how key trends will evolve, you need to have a point of view on the future, so I never mind sticking my neck out on predictions. In that vein, I will offer up four near certainties to occur over the next five years in our industry. Here they are....
Earlier this week, I had the honor of participating in a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The topic—“Global trends that will affect us all”—hit on the key issues that will shape our economies and cultures for the next 20 years.
It’s silly to talk about the death of TV. Around the world, more people are watching more minutes and hours of traditional TV per day than last year.
In the last two years, while the US population as a whole is watching more TV (live and time shifted), 18-24 year olds are watching less.
It’s not a “big shift” as yet…only 5%. And it almost certainly varies by urban vs. rural; gender; and race.
But I have seen this movie before. I remember the newspaper industry in the 1990s. It had always been true that teenagers didn’t subscribe or even read newspapers. That was OK…once they moved out and got a job or went to college they started. Then one day, around about 1995, that changed, and we started seeing (at first) very small annual DECREASES in print newspaper consumption in 18-24 year olds. 20 years later, that trend has been working away, and we now have the situation where (in one UK survey) less than 0.5% of 16-34 year olds listed print newspapers or magazines in their top five media they would miss the most....
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In the age of hyper-digital transformation, nine additional, incremental digital technologies join the eight from the previous age. These nine start with a relatively low level of importance today but increase by an average of 145% among digital leaders by the year 2020. These nine additional digital technologies reach the threshold of having an “important to very important” business impact among at least one-fourth of digital leaders: Telepresence (Skype, Google Hangouts, etc.) (49%) Digital currency (49%) Artificial intelligence (46%) Robotic process automation (software) (41%) Sharing economy platforms like Uber (39%) Nanotechnologies (35%) Robots (hardware) (33% Telematics (29%r) Wearables (28%) When combined, these seventeen digital technologies increase their business impact among digital leaders by an average of 112% between 2016 and 2020. The predicted business impact of these digital technologies mean that the business and IT organizations you operate today will need to look very different by 2020 in order to keep up and compete successfully....
Below, you’ll find a collection of innovations which are (re)defining customer expectations. These innovations – and the 5 big consumer trends they represent – show you glimpses of what your customers will want next.Understanding these trends will help you stay ahead of accelerating expectations, and lead you to actionable innovation opportunities. Readers who are serious about understanding the direction of consumerism across multiple dimensions will have already spotted that these trends don’t sit in splendid isolation. They are a handful of near-future fragments of the Bigger Picture – more on that below. But each one is also a killer opportunity to take to your team right now.So: read, think, debate. Then get going with building brands that matter, products that delight and campaigns people can't stop talking about!...
World and business leaders met at Davos this week to discuss the technologies that will change the world.
Ahead of the World Economic Forum annual meeting, the body compiled a list of technological "tipping points" the world will hit over the next 15 years. Here are the technologies the WEF, and experts it surveyed, believe will transform the near future, for better and for worse.
“This” is now more than a pronoun. In the online realm of social media, “this” is a statement, a proclamation, a call to action. Written often in caps, or as a hashtag (#THIS), “this” means “I second this sentiment,” “This is great” or “Read this.”
Now, “this” is a social network, This.cm, which allows users to post one link a day, with the intent of sifting through the Internet noise and focusing attention on a standout news article, blog post or podcast.
Currently, the platform is available only to those who receive an invitation from one of the nearly 4,500 users.
What do buyers say is the most important signal of vendor credibility? What type of content is most effective? What do marketers rate as the single most valuable SEO tactic? What are the top barriers to adopting social business practices?
Find the answers to these questions and many others in more than 100 social and online marketing stats from 20+ different sources....
The selfie storm reached its pinnacle at the Oscars earlier this year when Ellen Degeneres took the record-breaking selfie heard round the Internet. But was that actually an “usie”?
The AP recently reported on the growing trend of group selfies.“Usies are a growing trend that I think have far more social value than selfies,” said Michal Ann Strahilevitz, a professor of marketing at Golden Gate University in San Francisco who studies consumer behavior. “It’s magical capturing moments we share with other people.” In contrast to one-person selfies, usies are “more about the relationship, and less about you and your hair,” she said. The word — sometimes spelled usie, sometimes ussie — has been showing up in written material since at least April 2013, according to Ben Zimmer, executive producer of Vocabulary.com and language columnist for The Wall Street Journal....
According to Robert Scoble, if you want to read the future, look no further than the startup community.
As the Chief Startup Liaison for Rackspace, the Open Cloud Computing Company, Scoble travels the world looking for what's happening on the bleeding edge of technology for Rackspace's startup program. In his role, he studies the future by interviewing thousands of executives and technology innovators and reports what he learns in books.
Scoble's most recent book, "Age of Context," coauthored with Forbes author Shel Israel, talks about the five technology trends which will profoundly reshape our lives and our businesses over the next decade. Companies must prepare themselves for the Age of Context as the fusion of wearable computing, big data and computation, sensor data, social networking and location data will form today's new kind of contextual operating system.
So what does the future hold and how can you be sure that your company is well-positioned to be a leader in your industry? Here, Scoble shares his futuristic outlook and advice to startups....
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Understand new global and regional consumer trends and uncover innovation opportunities.