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!



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