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.

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