Iconoculture, a consumer research and advisory company, has published its take on top consumer trends for 2012. Here’s a quick look at what they see in the crystal ball.

1. Saving. With Europe’s current debt crisis and the United States still lolling in the Great Recession, consumers are looking for security and control in their financial lives, and they’re turning to savings, convenience and dependability to stay sane. Takeaway: Do whatever you can to help your clients feel in control and offer them ways to save.

2. Shopping. The tech revolution is changing how people buy, both in the aisle and on the couch. Takeaway: you need to make sure you build fluid connections between you and your clients, whether it be social networks, mobile or the telephone.

3. The new 70. Boomers do not see themselves as aging or as part of an older age group. The new 50 is actually closer to 70. Takeaway: when planning events for the over-50 crowd, be careful not to hand out the Geritol and walkers. This crowd is hip, in shape and wants new experiences.

4. Easy Pay. No checks, cash or cards? No problem—not if you have an iPhone and are a customer of Commonwealth Bank. This Australian bank is getting set to launch an app that makes payments instantly and remotely. Takeaway: Picture getting paid by email, Facebook or mobile number—on the spot.

5. Follow fashion. A German company is now making a new clothing line with powdered milk. The cloth, called Qmilch, is reported to have positive effects on the skin. Takeaway: Look for innovative fabrics and other décor items as new technologies are born.

The looming uncertainty over the global economy  has turned consumers into more value-conscious, mobile, experience-hungry, social sharing, green enthusiasts. Add a touch of convenience for a rapidly growing urban population worldwide, and this paints a picture of the new global consumer. As we near closer to a new year, Euromonitor reviewed the key consumer and industry trends that defined 2011, and offers the following prospects for 2012:

• Economic woes will see more consumers looking up to ‘new’ non-monetary forms of status like altruism, connectivity, eco-credentials and acquired skills

• 2012 will push consumers into a deal ecosystem in which the chase, the control, the perceived savvy, and novel tech-led thrift-alerts – not just the saving – make up a good deal

• Although many consumers can’t afford to buy green, they expect brands to be trailblazers and to clean up their act! Brands like Patagonia are taking back used products for rewards, and recycling will shine

• Less will be more in 2012. Companies will be helping their customers to consume less of their products

• In 2012, opportunities to cater to millions of low-income urban consumers will be the biggest ever

• Crowdsourced problem-solving will trigger innovation – especially if participation is made simpler

• Consumer respect will be beamed at brands showing their human side; both in terms of transparency and caring initiatives

• Consumer vigilantes will have a sustained high profile - protesting in the physical and online worlds

• While the digital and physical worlds are converging via a mobile 24/7 net access, consumers want seamless access to positives of the digital world: convenience, control, choice etc. in the real world

• The ‘consumerization’ of health means that customers are now looking for health as a feature, product, experience or service

• Emphasis will be on conscious consumption in 2012 as consumers continue their search for a more meaningful life

• Where people shop for packaged food is, and will be, just as important as what they buy

• Collaborative consumption, renting goods instead of buying them, will be big in 2012

• Income inequality will be an increasing cause for concern in 2012. The richest 10% of households in 24 major economies account for more than 1/3 of their country’s income. The incomes of the richest 10% in the USA are 37 times higher than those of the poorest

• Unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, will plague advanced economies in 2012. More than half of people aged 15-24 are without work in Spain

• Best case scenario will see retailing be worth US$13.2 trillion by the end of 2012. However, macro-economic issues will remain a concern

• Cross-border sales through internet stores are likely to put bricks-and-mortar retailers in all countries under pressure in the short term

• Grocery retailers set to enjoy faster growth than their non-grocery peers. Taking a greater share of their competitors’ sales will likely aid grocery retailers during the year

• Underlining the growing divide globally in terms of spending power, jewellers is expected to be the fastest growing channel in 2012, boosted by emerging markets, while warehouse clubs will be second

• Retailers are going to have to be increasingly aware of m-commerce in 2012

• Asia Pacific to overtake Western Europe as the biggest regional packaged food market in 2016

• With more mouths to feed, retail volume will continue to outpace retail value sales

• A growing prevalence of convenience and snacking  will make eating on-the-go the new “normal”

In 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype; Facebook's and Twitter's advertising platforms gained momentum; Google joined the social networking party with Google+; social became a mainstream component within search-engine results pages (SERPs); and Congress called for increased disclosure by companies providing location-based services.

As 2012 follows on the heels of such events, what digital changes and trends should forward-thinking marketers anticipate? Here are Optify's Top 12 predictions for the year ahead.

1. Marketing automation 2.0 will arrive, ushering in mature software and increasing enterprise adoption

Historically, marketing automation has consisted primarily of email and email nurturing. In 2011, however, we witnessed the expansion of social customer relationship management (CRM). Marketing automation is now one of the fastest growing segments of the CRM industry.

In 2012, it will evolve from being an early-adopter tool into a mainstream solution for organizations that want to connect marketing operations, from the very top of the funnel, to online search, and down through sales and customer management.

The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report has become a constant source of inspiration for all kinds of technical and business professionals, from IT managers, marketers, directors to entrepreneurs.

The latest report includes technologies such as speech-to-speech translation, 3D printing, quantum computing and gamification.

What’s in store for communicators, PR pros, and marketers in 2012?

It’s that time of year again! It’s time for the PR, communications, and marketing world to look at the challenges and opportunities ahead. It’s time we determine what’s in store for our businesses, our industry, and our way of working.

We spent weeks scouring the web, talking to industry experts, and listening to our customers. We wanted to boil down the changes we see shaping the PR and marketing landscape to ten essential trends.

After doing our research, we noticed a red thread going through the majority of the trends we highlight below. The changes in the PR and media landscape distinctly reflect the changes in human behavior we’ve been observing and experiencing ourselves over the past few years – changes brought upon by new technologies. Think about how we consume information nowadays, as well as what we expect from the creators of this information in terms of presentation and access. Think about how you as content creators aim to share and spread this information in order to gain maximum exposure and engagement.

For us, the trends below are about understanding these changes in human behavior, the technologies that affect them, and the engagement you can create from giving your audience a sense of achievement, empowerment, authenticity, and fun. Hopefully our research will give you – the communicator, the PR pro, or the marketer – the tools, the motivation, and the knowledge to tackle the challenges head-on.

We live in amazing times, but it can only get even better in 2012!

NB: The following trends were presented by Jonathan Bean, COO at Mynewsdesk, during the three-day Mynewsday conference. His and other presentations can be viewed in the Mynewsdesk newsroom.

Table of Contents

• 1. Digital First
• 2. Decentralize Social Media
• 3. I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends
• 4. Customize This!
• 5. Brand News World

 

1. Digital First

We’re seeing a big shift happening – a shift that will most likely continue throughout next year. Companies and organizations are now, finally, giving digital marketing channels precedence over traditional, analog media. Of course an integrated marketing approach remains key, but digital comes first, both in strategy and in budget.

Image by bo47 (click to view Flickr stream)

 

An important example of this is the Guardian newspaper in the UK. They are describing themselves as a digital organization, even though the majority of revenue still comes from print. However, a story published in print media is self-limiting. It forces stories to have a beginning and an end. It cannot adapt or keep up with rapid developments that might change the story.

However, if a story lives online, in social media, it can develop organically, quickly. It’s a new way of working for the journalists, but it’s clearly more effective in meeting the needs of their readers. This concept of social journalism, as Jeff Jarvis puts it, allows journalist to involve the people, the audience. You see things like live reporting a developing story to a broad audience, allowing them to interact and engage. A story becomes more expansive because it is open to outside, real-time influence.

The same concept can be applied to the business world. What this really reflects is a behavioral change that has been in the making for a number of years. A brand or organization’s audience is increasingly found online and is demanding the companies to be digital too. The consumption of media now happens through the web, through apps, through social media. It forces a structural change like the one Guardian is going through.

When it comes to PR pros and communicators, the focus will be to meet the needs of your online-savvy audience and influencers, needs that are actually quite similar to those of the Guardian’s audience. This means re-engineering your business, much like the media business has done. In other words, you must involve your stakeholders in your business. You must encourage your influencers to develop, share, and spread your story digitally.

 

2. Decentralize Social Media

Is social media decentralized at your company? Or is social media is controlled by a single department, or even just one person? Chances you would answer yes to the latter. Last year, we mentioned Jeremiah Owyang’s Frameworks for Social Business.

We believe that social media will become increasingly decentralized, forming the holistic “honeycomb” pattern, where everyone is socially enabled, has access to a company’s social networks, and represents the company even on their private accounts.

Concrete examples of this are Dell, SolResor, and, you guessed it, Mynewsdesk.

What we’re seeing is that social media is becoming integrated in to the whole organization. Ownership is spread and social media becomes a tool for conversation, not just a marketing, PR, or client services channel. And why? Because it’s now about people, not logos. Every employee should be a brand ambassador.

But there are risks in socializing your enterprise. You must relinquish control of your brand story, trust non-marketers to represent your brand, and accept an inconsistent brand message. But according to Paul Holmes, “the more consistent a company’s message, the less authentic it sounds. […] Any consistency should be organic – a natural result of shared values and cultural cohesion, rather than imposed by the message police.”

For PR and communications people, it will be vital to empower every employee and enable them to be the different faces of the company, each with a similar, but not identical, understanding of the company’s values. This means that cultural values must be communicated internally.

This could require a fundamental organizational change. If the employee is not “good” at social media, or isn’t willing to be represent your brand in this landscape, you might have to rethink your hiring criteria.

 

3. I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends

We’ve all heard about user-generated content, and maybe even attempted to get some. However, what do we do with this material once we have it? Unfortunately, not much at the moment. But in 2012, crowd-generated digital storytelling will (finally) be fully embraced.

The trick is to find your crowd, to find the people that will help you tell your story digitally. These are your influencers, your colleagues, or your friends. They are the people nearest to you. Southwest Airlines is a strong believer in this. According to Brooke Thomas, emerging media coordinator, stories can be found everywhere, especially on Twitter: “Every tweet is essentially a story idea.”

A recent example of Southwest embracing crowd-generated content was when frequent flyer Paul Lovine proposed to his girlfriend on a Southwest Airline flight and then tweeted that she had accepted. Southwest picked up the story, contacted Paul, and wrote a blog entry about it.

Why would Southwest Airlines go through this trouble for one passenger? In our personal lives, we are judged and defined by the company we keep, by the people that surround us. It’s the same for brands and companies. A brand is defined by its customers, its friends, and its influencers. Engaging with them and sharing the stories they tell about your brand ultimately reflects what kind of company you are or want to be – your influencers can add to your credibility. It is therefore essential that PR pros and communicators start building and interacting with their networks, both internally and externally.

But there are pitfalls, as Coca Cola can attest to.

 

The first video depicts one of the largest social media campaigns Coca Cola has ever made. The second is an initiative of Duane Perera, a regular Coke fan – an entirely grass-roots effort, so to speak. Coincidentally, both have similar concepts and both occurred around the same time, but Duane outshone Coca Cola’s official, corporate campaign in terms of subscribers, views, and mentions.

Why wasn’t Coke’s campaign more successful? The one thing to keep in mind with user-generated content is that authenticity is rewarded, while artificiality is, at best, ignored, if not condemned. However, the biggest problem is that Coca Cola haven’t made concrete steps to engage with Duane, despite talks earlier this year. Essentially, Coca Cola are ignoring the social network Duane built around his travel videos.

If you come across something that one of your influencers did or created, on their own initiative, embrace it. It will lend more credibility and authenticity to your brand than anything coming from an official corporate campaign.

 

4. Customize This!

Personalized content will make the Internet more effective, as increasingly the needs of the individual are catered to, rather than a larger demographic or target group.

A very personalized Mini. Image by Martin Pettitt (click to view Flickr stream)

 

A clear example of this is in the news world. Last year, we discussed the emergence of applications like Zite, Flipboard, Pulse, and Trove. What these and other tools do is allow the news to find us. We don’t look for news anymore, because we automatically receive news about the specific subjects we’ve asked for from our networks and services.

The behavioral change we observe is that people are choosing their own content, on their own terms. We don’t like being pushed suggestions by people we don’t know or trust. We are more interested in what our friends say is newsworthy, not what a news editor says.

A similar pattern can be seen in the continued rise of social commerce. Recommendation services have been around for a while, like on Amazon.com, but recently social commerce has been developing most rapidly on Facebook. As Mark Zuckerberg puts it, “If I had to guess, Social Commerce is next to blow up.”

Zuckerberg might be biased, because if the numbers add up, Facebook stand to gain big – up to 10-15% of total consumer spending could occur through Facebook (social commerce on Facebook even has its very own buzzword: f-commerce). Facebook is the perfect platform for a company to sell their products, because of the sheer number of active users and the way they interact with each other. Not only will this mean that users can recommend products and services to others, but it can also lead to a completely unique variety of products for each user to see.

What does this mean for you, the PR pro, marketer, or communicator? Remember that the concept of personalized news or social commerce relies on people creating a trusted and engaged network around them – a network that will help them achieve their expectations. Communicators have to be keyed in to those networks.

Companies, too, can build networks and have influencers – both externally and internally. As stated before, the people in these networks need to be empowered to share your products, services, and stories with their own network, on their own terms.

 

5. Brand News World

We’ve seen companies and organizations take a clear step towards being digital first, towards embracing crowd-generated content, and towards empowering both their external and internal influencers. But on top of all that, companies and organizations will start thinking like journalists when creating and curating stories around their brand.

White board notes from SXSWi

 

What is Brand Journalism then, and why do we need to distinguish it from content marketing? According to a panel discussion at this year’s SXSWi, brand journalism is described as:

• An editorial approach to brand building
• A nonfiction attempt at advertising
• Thinking more like publishers
• It’s all about real time marketing, brands acting as media in real time, as life happens
• It’s the responsibility of companies to help their customers succeed

The purpose is to tell stories, but this method of content marketing emphasizes a neutral tone, lending credibility and trust to the brand. This tone does not slant to favor your brand, nor is every piece promoting an aspect of your company directly. Stories could be about industry leaders, trends, or events too – anything that would be deemed newsworthy for your audience, in the editorial sense.

That’s the key to brand journalism – taking out the middleman by thinking like the middleman (in this case, the journalists). Nissan is a great example of this. They hired a bunch of journalists (victims of a downsizing trend among news organizations) to run the Nissan newsroom. Simon Sproule, head of global marketing communications at Nissan, says, “It’s about killing press releases. We decided that if we’ve got good stories to tell, we’ll tell them ourselves.”

We talked last year about companies and brands becoming media houses and we see that continuing next year – even going a step further by convincing media people to make the switch from journalism to PR.

As a communicator you need to start thinking of your content in terms of newsworthiness. Offer value, think of all audiences, not just journalists, and don’t always talk about yourself.

---

Look for "Part 2" to be published tomorrow (November 30, 2011) on Social Media Today.

 

 

 

Retail More streamlined, more social

Those in Europe and America may still be teetering on the brink of recession, but, if anything, the world of retail seems to have been galvanized by the relentlessly bleak outlook, offering a succession of innovations and experiments throughout 2011.

The rapidly evolving relationship between our online and offline consumer behaviour is driving inventive new consumer experiences that merge the best of both worlds in useful and increasingly intuitive ways.

Staking a claim on that most precious resource, our disposable income, means that brands must work harder and smarter than ever. Even as economies falter, flash-sale sites have flourished, with consumers still willing to splash out so long as they're assured a kick-ass discount to preserve that crucial feeling of fiscal responsibility.

However, deal-of-the-day juggernaut Groupon, the leading light at the start of the year, has had a bumpier ride of late. Fierce competition from upstart rivals – think Amazon-backed Living Social, Google Offers and over 500 other hungry new players worldwide – cashing in on their business model is just part of the problem. Hard-luck tales from disgruntled vendors make for bad headlines and despite typically netting 50% of the profit on the deals it offers, the company has a $500m deficit around its neck. Notwithstanding the launch of Groupon Now, a mobile-based real-time deals service, its failure to innovate consistently and distinguish itself from the pack looks ominous not to mention the long term economic effects of this cut-price culture…

The 12^th year of the 21^st century is close upon us, bringing not just a new slate, but also a sense of significance: the very number 12 commands a lot of attention, in different ways.

For product brands it’s a unit of trade – 12 units to a dozen, said to be cheaper than other number sets. Service brands can identify with the 12 labors of Hercules. For readers there’s Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Virgil’s 12 books of the Aeneid, and the Bible’s 12 Apostles. Music? There’s the holiday’s 12 drummers drumming and 12 studio albums released by the Beatles. Once on celluloid, now digitally viewed, there are popular films: 12 Angry Men, Twelve O’clock High, and who can forget The Dirty Dozen. And whether an early or late adopter, there are 12 function keys on a computer and 12 “buttons” on telephonic key pads. Oh, and as everyone knows, there are 12 inches to a foot, 12 ribs to a chest, and 12 months to the year, with 12 associated constellations – those star configurations once thought to be portents of the things to come.

But as this is the 21^st century, we prefer to rely upon the validated power of predictive loyalty and engagement metrics. Those, incidentally, allow marketers to measure the direction and velocity of consumer values and expectations at least 12 months in advance of the marketplace.

So we offer up 12 trends for 2012. Because success comes from acting on a trend when it’s identified – not waiting for market highs and lows. These 12 will have direct consequences to the success, or failure, of next year’s branding, engagement, and marketing efforts. For today’s blog we’re presenting the first six:

1) Value Is the Deal

Differentiated and believable brand meaning – emotional, rational, functional, and experiential – becomes a more effective and profitable surrogate for value than low-lower-lowest pricing strategies. But only the consumer gets to say how “valuable” is actually defined. Employ effective systems to listen to them and then figure out ways to tune in the consumer’s frequency.

2) Social Network Security

Friends have an even greater influence on purchase habits than before, but the trust in the community outside the brand space will only be extended to the brand if truly understood and properly incorporated into brand outreach strategies. More connected consumers won’t call, text, or email, but will use social network streams to talk about brands, create personalized content, and increase brand engagement – all necessitating a deeper understanding of what drives a brand’s category and how social network platforms play their part. But watch for more powerful peer-to-peer recommendations coming in the form of subject and feedback blogs – more targeted, more trusted, and more motivating than advertising, promotions, sponsorships, or celebrity endorsements.

3) Inward Bound

Differentiation will increasingly come from a brand’s emotional offerings and finding what will best resonate with consumers. Doing what others do signals commodity, not brand. This is one suit that needs to be custom made. Personal connection and engagement will be more and more critical especially in today’s weakened economy.