Looking back for our future: How might marketing change in the next 30 years?
This week we reflected on Back to the Future's attempts to predict the future for brands, and found out just how difficult it is to guess what might happen in 30 years' time. Undeterred, Nick Tate gazes into his crystal ball to tell us what marketing might look like three decades from now.
Back to the Future Day had us dreaming about the next 30 years...
If Michael Fish has taught us anything, it’s that the future, whether that means tomorrow or 30 years from now, is difficult to predict. Wikipedia’s only insight into 2045 comes in the form of Critters 4, set in that year. But if that is any indication of what’s in store then troublesome spiky alien hedgehogs with deep-rooted behavioural issues will be chasing us around a space station.
Disaster.
I am of the scorned generation who cry “where are these sodding hoverboards I was promised?" (And those recently banned by police don’t count.) Like so many things yet to truly materialise, I'm predisposed to distrust the extreme future gazers – those who threaten of a life underground or even in the stars. And these warnings are usually coupled with forecasts of recycled urine or robot pet fish. But I fear these mystics are about as useful as my recycled piss.
Change is inevitable, and for some that is their only constant. The way we eat, socialise, play and interact with each other is changing. Even the manner and the location of our work and home lives is beginning to change dramatically – think flexi-time, the migration out of major cities, online dating and the rise of convenience shopping. We’re a hyper charged, 'on-the-go', real-time society that’s never been more connected to, yet isolated from, one another. That will only increase as the years tick by.
And it’s these behaviours, not messaging or media, which will have the most dramatic effect on how we shop and how we buy. In turn this will affect how and where advertisers choose to spend their budgets to capture consumers' attention and challenge the status quo. We have already seen the backlash in ad blocking and lack of understanding the role of a mobile in people’s lives.
As technology envelops and homogenises the world around us, our expectation will always be that things should be quicker, cheaper and better. In such a commoditised world, the only thing companies will be able to trade on will be 'brand', or more importantly their products and the necessary customer-centric experiences wrapped around them. So what does this really mean?
- Brands will increasingly need to challenge convention when it comes to creating valuable experiences for their consumers, based on consumer needs, not their own.
- Brands will need to earn consumers’ loyalty, not the other way round.
- Brands will live and die on how flexible they can be around their consumers’ lives.
- And brands will need to enter into equal partnerships with their consumers. The days of subjecting consumers to broadcast messaging will be long gone. Be useful or entertaining, open dialogues on my terms and I will give you my undivided attention, and maybe even my hard earned cash – that’s the way the world’s going.
So what of Minority Report style hyper-relevant personalised communications, real time product fulfillment, drone delivery, data fuelled experiences, productless showrooms, butter and eggs arriving in your fridge for the cake you hadn’t even thought about making next Friday because your iPhone told your fridge there’s a school fete next weekend…. ?
Yes… that will all be there I’m sure.
But the brands that succeed will be the selfless ones. Who build themselves, their products and their communications around their consumers to answer a genuine need via a genuine and tangible purpose. Not the newest technologies.
Nick Tate is the head of new business and marketing at Naked Communications