Trends for 2017 in Marketing, Business, and Society

Season's Greetings and warm wishes for a great year!

In Content Marketing, 'tis the season for either predicting the trends/things to watch out for this year or give a quick review of what worked and what didn't in the year gone by… or maybe both. My content calendar too has the same topics :)

However, looking at my past blog posts that I posted around this time, I realize how repetitive the predictions were year after year. For example for past few years, all subject matter experts including me, are talking about Mobile, Augmented Reality, IoT, etc as the things to watch out for and it looks like it will remain the same for next couple of years too. Hence this year, I wanted to look at trends in a broader but more impactful perspective.

I was attending a corporate event during the last week of December and got to hear various speakers from technology, consultancy, and media fields. They shared their observations and wisdom on how they perceive digital will impact markets in general and other important issues that concerns India in specific and world in general. From the talks, I got some insights into what the top 3 trends could be:


In a larger sense, 2017 is going to be all about empowerment. Be it the common man, the marginalized, the women , the society is going through a lot of changes when it comes to empowerment. Thanks to technology and its impact, people who never felt heard and were silent till now are getting vocal and getting noticed too. Maybe, the Brexit and US presidential results are in some way the signs of feeling of empowerment by the majority of silent people. The popular acceptance of demonetization, the clamor for transparency in the government functioning, overall the shrugging away of status quo and accepting drastic change in hope of betterment are all signs of an empowered society

From a business or organization perspective, it will be ideas driven. As the markets turn homogenous, as the product replication time reduces, the need to innovate becomes imperative. Small companies, especially startups, will sprout based on various innovative ideas,  and large organizations too will look at their internal pool of functions and people to innovate. The reason why I say Big Ideas is that for an idea creator, no idea is too small :)

Lastly, when it comes to marketing… it will be about Big Data. Mostly, the use of data will be driven by 2 factors:

  • To do n=1 marketing (or to coin a new term cell-marketing), wherein by using big data you can focus and pin point your marketing activity to a single outlet or customer. This means data will be analyzed on real-time basis  for better and faster marketing/business decisions
  • Exploring Co-data marketing…where-in various data points (usually by different companies) will be shared to market a new set of services to the customer. For example, data points from a credit card company and a fast food outlet company (or a health provider) will be taken by an insurance company to offer me customized insurance package/premium .

This year, hope to see a society that is more empowered, where the businesses comes with new ideas and where marketing becomes personalized, thanks to big data

L'Chaim!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Best Indian websites - 2007

Image
Hi, This was an article that appeared in PC World India Nice stuff Santosh ------------------------------------ Technology will dominate the future and the web is clearly one of its greatest manifestations. Forget the dotcom bust that many sceptics will remind you of The Web is going to become our way of life in India . There are enough statistics to point to the rapid growth of the Internet in India – number of connections, e-mail accounts, transaction revenue – all very convincing. But who needs statistics? Just a quick look around will reveal how web is fast replacing traditional brick-n-mortar operations. Be it picking new stocks or new friends, finding a job or a bride, there’s a web way to things that is proving far more effective, and rewarding. Websites today are built with robust understanding of users and available technology. They purposefully pursue fulfilling the needs of their audience but are grounded in strong business reality. And hence, unlike the fairy-tail era gone
Read more

10 Reasons Marketing Strategy should include the Internet

It may seem surprising but many companies, big and small, have yet to develop a rational Internet marketing strategy. Considering the Internet has now been used effectively by marketers since 1994, any organization without a strategy to utilize the Internet for marketing is probably making a big mistake. For any organization that still does not have a meaningful Internet marketing effort we offer 10 Reasons why you should. 1. The Go-To Place for Information Possibly the most important reason why companies need to have an active Internet marketing strategy is because of the transformation that has occurred in how customers seek information. While customers still visit stores, talk to sales representatives, look through magazines, and talk to friends to gather product information, an ever-increasing number of customers turn to the Internet as their primary knowledge source. In particular, they use search engines as their principle portal of knowledge as search sites have become the leadi
Read more

Teach Marketing, Yoda Can

Image
About 8 years back, I wrote an analogical article about Kung Fu Panda and digital marketing (you can read it here ). That time my kid was 3 years. Now my kid is 11 years old. As all growing kids do, he too has out-grown the Kung Fu Panda-The Lion King phase. His current fascination is The Star Wars. I guess, by now, he must have finished watching at-least 3-4 times….The Star Wars Saga - the original, sequel, and prequel trilogies, animated series, The book of Boba Fett, The Mandalorian, and even the Thrawn trilogy books. The next on his wish list is to own an original lightsaber… Kids are demanding! Well, this article is not about my kid or his love for Star Wars. Working from home and watching these movies along with my kid, this is about my thoughts on what Star Wars can teach us about marketing, or more importantly what marketing tips Yoda can teach “Do or do not. There is no try.” We all know that planning is very important when it comes to any campaign/project. But every great pl
Read more