Brand and Marketing Trends for 2010

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 is up to the brand, determined by how it responds to today’s reality.

The post-recession landscape will present brand marketers with new challenges, new engagement realities and new rules, which will increase pressure to prove how and why branded products deliver value.

In his recent Brand and Marketing Trends for 2010, Dr. Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys predicted that there are 10 trends that marketers shall pay attention:

1. Value is the new black
2. Brands are increasingly a surrogate for “value”
3. Brand differentiation is Brand Value
4. “Because I Said So” is so over
5. Consumer expectations are growing
6. Old tricks don’t work/won’t work anymore
7. They won’t need to know you to love you
8. It’s not just buzz
9. They’re talking to each other before talking to the brand
10. Engagement is not a fad; it’s the way today’s consumers do business

Speaking of brands, an eMarketer report states, “Researchers at Pennsylvania State University studied nearly 150,000 tweets that named brands and found that nearly one-half of them were simply ‘comments’ – posts that mentioned a brand, but where the primary focus was something else. A further 18.1% were information-providing and 11.1% were information-seeking.”.

The study discovered that brand-tweeters do so in order to connect with products.

“Businesses use micro-communication for brand awareness, brand knowledge and customer relationship,” said Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at Penn State. “Personal use is all over the board. It may be right up there with e-mail in terms of its communication impact.”

Though the brand-related Tweets in the study had varying tonality, “a lot of the brand comments were positive,” Jansen said, adding that “there are some good products out there, or at least products that people are happy with. People are using tweets to express their reaction, both positive and negative, as they engage with these products and services, and tweets are about as close as one can get to the customer point of purchase for products and services.”

No matter you love it or hate it, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and more are increasingly common for effectively reaching both internal and external audiences.

Yet, while many in management have embraced the idea of delivering into social networking waters, many of these same individuals have supported policies that prevent their own employees from using these new communication channels. But why? What are their concerns? And, more importantly, what are they doing to address them?

You can learn more from the survey that conducted by Minneapolis-based Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law Embracing the Opportunities, Averting the Risks in July 2009.

Hope this information will help your company’s management, marketing and human resource professionals engage in the social media conversation – both using these new communication opportunities and addressing any underlying concerns – not as unilateral dictates, but as natural extensions of corporate values and ethics.