Every marketing expert with a blog and a pulse has already released a “predictions” list for 2009 — they’ve become as ubiquitous as the end-of-year best-of albums and Oscar favorites. Neither a soothsayer nor a guru, I won’t endeavor to predict the future. But I can make some educated guesses, based on a lot of reading, trendwatching, and some old-fashioned history-repeats-itself wisdom. Here is my contribution to the blogosphere’s 2009 list-fest: nine hunches about where brand communications are heading in the next 12 months.
1. Brands will go back to basics.
In these tenuous times, we’ll see brands seeking solace in the stuff that has always worked for them. They’ll put more emphasis on their cornerstone products and simplify their messaging to promote the core values that made them successful in the first place. An Interbrand study published during the last economic downturn in 2001 promoted companies’ need to separate the wheat from the chaff: carefully evaluating and eliminating all unnecessary product brands, subbrands or program brands, so companies can instead focus money and energy on building out the brands with the strongest customer loyalty and capitalizing on their potential.
2. Communicators will seek non-traditional channels that work harder for them.
With business on the edge of its seat wondering when the next economic hit is going to come, marketers are quickly finding themselves with more constrained budgets. Print advertising is out; for some companies, print anything is out for the time being. Discovering marketing and communications efforts that work harder and go farther for less money is key. One example is the diamond company Hearts on Fire, which launched a viral Internet campaign à la last season’s dancing elves, distancing itself from the conservative advertising and promotional campaigns traditionally favored by the jewelry industry.
3. Hope will prevail.
Americans responded overwhelmingly to a strong, clear message of hope, change and unity in the November presidential election, and I can’t remember the last time spirits were so high after that message – and its evangelist, Barack Obama – won out over negativity and complacency. The collective mood quickly plummeted in the following weeks with all the disheartening news about unemployment, dismal retail sales, and war in the Middle East. But I suspect that as the Obama administration takes office and change starts becoming a reality, communicators will piggyback on that mood and message of optimism and hope. Pepsi, for one, is counting on it in its 2009 “Optimism Project.”
4. Audiences will start to tune out.
We have reached a fever pitch in the amount of information and stimuli any one individual can process in a given moment. Especially given that so much of the content coming our way right now leans toward the negative and unproductive, I believe people will begin to be more selective in the amount of information they choose to encounter and engage with. More productivity and business thought leaders – including the king of simplicity, Jakob Nielsen – are advocating the shunning of habitual email, IM, RSS readers, Twitter and other compulsions that fragment attention and interrupt our flow. If the backlash happens, communicators will be under more pressure to truly break through the clutter by providing information that customers consider vital to their business success (in the case of B2B) or lives (B2C).
5. The social media shakeout will begin.
In the mid to late 1990s, everybody talked about how Web sites, to be relevant, had to have a online community – which at the time meant a bulletin board and a chatroom with hosted live chats. Yet few companies could actually figure out how to build an online community where people would actually congregate. It was the “If you build it will they come?” question. Over the years those tools have naturally found their niches – for example, bulletin boards are perfect tools for software companies whose community of users can provide free tech support to one another, or provide organic feedback that helps the company evolve the product.
Now, everybody says we all need to be on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. Yesterday, I attend a lunch meeting of the Independent Communicators Roundtable, a group of highly accomplished, educated and creative writers, brand and PR consultants and other entrepreneurs. Everybody at the table of about 12 people shared the same frustration: we’re not quite sure what to do with Twitter. We know we’re supposed to be “joining the conversation,” but what exactly does that mean? I personally have followed countless writers, communicators, business consultants and big thinkers, and mostly I have been bombarded by Tweets about bad colds and snowstorms. Rarely do I see a Tweet from a stranger that makes me want to jump in and start talking.
Point being: much of this social media hype is putting the solution before the problem, or the platform before the business need. If a company still doesn’t know whether it should be blogging after several years of talking about it, the answer is probably “no.” We will begin to watch social media tools shake out and serve legitimate business purposes to support true brand communications objectives. But I suspect we’ll see a lot less advice about how your company simply must join the fray.
6. On the other hand … social media will continue to influence brands.
And now I am going to contradict everything I just said in #5 – sort of – with the assertion that “the conversation” taking place on social media platforms will begin to have more influence on companies and their brands in 2009. The Motrin vs. Twitter Moms debacle in November was one of the first examples of how a powerful community of consumers using Twitter could blacken the eye of a stalwart brand in a matter of hours. Motrin manufacturer McNeil Consumer Healthcare recovered impressively, picking up on the wildfire quickly and falling over itself to claim mea culpa and make up for its mistakes.
My first question after it all happened: will this make McNeil, and other corporations, more aware of the need to build a real relationship with their consumers, rather than assuming they know who their customers are and what they need? When companies discover that they indeed need a little bonding time with their consumers, using social media to grow that relationship organically (instead of forcing it through false camaraderie) is indeed the legitimate business need that I talk about in the previous point.
7. Customers will begin to drive the message.
In the healthcare space where I do a lot of my work, we talk a lot about the emergence of consumer-directed healthcare. So much information (much of it credible) is now immediately available and so many communities of people are able to share experiences and recommendations that the patient is – possibly for the first time ever – in control. And that is becoming true for all industries and groups of customers. The means are in place for customers to ask directly for what they want from a company and a product. If the company doesn’t, or can’t, comply, customers can and will go elsewhere. Finding a way to “hear” customers and being agile enough to respond to what they’re saying is going to become an essential part of doing business.
8. Companies will continue to talk more narrowly to target audiences.
From a business perspective, being everything to everybody can be (depending on your business) a good position. From a brand perspective, it doesn’t really work. Audiences have a hard time taking a sweeping message about comprehensiveness and boiling it down to answer the biggest pressing question they have: “What can this company do for me and me alone?” More companies are beginning to target their brand positioning to more narrowly defined groups of customers. Read this case study about SeaPak, a frozen shrimp company that identified two very different consumer profiles – the “live-to-cook” shoppers and the “cook-to-live” shoppers – and positioned its brand differently for each group.
9. Language will continue to disintegrate in the name of pop culture.
The image speaks for itself. (Thanks to Melissa Klug for the secret shopper photo!) Whether the infiltration of SMS abbreviations and colloquialisms in our written language is a good thing or a bad thing I leave up for debate – but let’s just say I bet a certain journalism school professor of mine is feeling pretty crabby about this continuing trend.
