8 Marketing Trends Predicted for 2018

I believe you have been annoyed by the "case review", "year-end summary", and "trend forecast" for several days in a row... These similar and vague articles seem to have no value or meaning to you, or any guidance or help, except for being "collected with one click". I guess the author did not consider this issue at all when writing.

This time, I try to share some of my thoughts on future trends. They have varying depths of expertise, different focuses, different levels of difficulty, and even different degrees of impact on you. They are suitable for everyone from "newbies" to "business owners" in the marketing field, so you don't have to read all of them and accept them all. First read the title to find the content that interests you, spend some time reading it, think carefully and independently, and even come up with a response plan based on your own characteristics. "Discover - Analyze - Solve" is the value of trends.

1. Slogans are becoming less and less important

(To: Senior Creative Copywriter )

This is not to deny the value of the slogan, but to say that it has finally come down from the altar. With the changes in the various forms of brand communication, the proportion of traditional advertising forms (TVC/print advertising) has become smaller, and consumers' memory of brand promotion is no longer based on a slogan. Nowadays, Coca -Cola, KFC , Starbucks , and Durex have various gameplays and cases emerging in an endless stream, and they even often dominate the screen, but how many consumers can still remember their slogans when mentioning the brands, and still talk about the slogans with relish?

Insight: In the era of traditional advertising (when other forms of promotion were scarce), slogans were deified for two reasons: first, because the brand status was higher than that of consumers at that time, slogans were more like descriptions and testimonies of the brand, and consumers used slogans to show that they were fans of a certain brand;

On the other hand, the creativity and conciseness of the slogan itself make it easier to extract and remember during communication. When chatting about gossip, slogans are like a common context or label among friends, which can prove that you have seen a brand’s recent popular advertisement... Nowadays, consumers and brands have long been equal. Consumers rarely worship a brand, but are more willing to define and describe the brand/promotion in their own way, such as "Yi Er San’s video is really bitchy, but I like it!", "I didn’t expect the song comments on NetEase Cloud Music in the subway to be so heartbreaking", "Have you been to Zhihu’s Sanlitun pop-up store?"...

Therefore, fellow creative copywriters (especially those working in traditional advertising companies), please stop thinking that writing slogans is the “most advertising”, “most talented”, and “most sacred” job, and don’t think that writing content or WeChat sharing messages are all monotonous and boring “dirty and rubbish jobs”. Participate actively in all the writing work in the project, and learn to express creativity in various styles and forms. Perhaps the highlights of a certain link will be magnified by the audience and become a memorable point for a project or even a brand.

2. New media is finally no longer new, and homogeneous competition begins

(To: Social Media Company)

Recalling the popularity of Weibo and WeChat in the past few years, to the live broadcasts and short videos of celebrities in the past two years... although the forms of presentation are different, in essence they are all dominated by self-media (personal voice), and the core communication fission models are also similar, and there are no subversive new tricks.

At the same time, after several years of fighting, trial and error, and paying tuition fees, whether it is the corporate client, traditional advertising/PR companies, or self-media celebrity studios, they have all seen and imitated the gameplay and routines of new media marketing. It can be said that the gap in understanding and application of new media among communication agencies in first-tier cities is getting smaller and smaller, and the trend of homogeneous competition has obviously intensified. As for those companies that claim to be "social media companies" and think they are different from traditional advertising/PR companies, if they are still only able to take advantage of hot topics by making posters, writing jokes by putting together long pictures, and finding KOLs to make a profit, they will have no unique competitive advantages to rely on. In 2018, they will feel that it is becoming increasingly difficult to make money.

Insight: I have always believed that most domestic communication agencies actually compete on three points: new technology (trying out new things), good ideas (content), and scale (resource) advantages. Consumers' enthusiasm for pursuing products also unfolds in the order of these three points. For example, when HTML5 first appeared, no matter what brand or content it was, as long as consumers could experience functional operations such as "click, slide, and gravity sensing", they would be full of curiosity and become ecstatic.

Later, the H5 format began to become popular, so the competition turned to which brand's H5 was more interesting, better made, and used functions more cleverly and naturally; then, when the brands' performance standards were generally up to standard, the competition turned to resource combination. Which brand can mobilize and utilize various resources more reasonably, which brand can actively reach the threshold of voice, and which brand will have the opportunity to dominate the screen.

So, when the novelty of new media formats wears off, when consumers' tastes become more and more discerning, and when traditional large companies have figured out the rules of the game , how many "social new media" companies can, in addition to lowering prices, find their own advantages in the three core elements of technology, creativity, and resources to survive? Those good days of "stupid people, lots of money, and few competitors" will never come back.

3. The new media operation team will be separated from the agency and returned to the corporate marketing department

(To: New Media Operations )

Continuing from the previous point , new media has long been an essential battlefield for brand promotion, and everyone is familiar with the basic routines of daily operations; new media operators are no longer the hot and high-paid newcomers they were in the past two years, and the supply of practitioners has become greater than the demand; coupled with the commercialization and transparent development of large self-media KOLs, personnel, technology, and resources are no longer a difficult task. As a result, more companies began to consider taking back official accounts from agency companies, operating them on a daily basis themselves, and then handing them over to agency companies for assistance in operations when major projects came.

Insight: Operations has been the dominant behavior of enterprises since its conception. Whether it is the continuous investment of a large amount of energy, the standardization of image and style, the integration and acquisition of resource information, and the rapid feedback of decision-making mechanisms... these are often easier to achieve under the dominant operation within the enterprise. Compared with agencies, our staff are dedicated to their posts and will not be overtaken by other brands in pitching; we can get feedback on resources between company departments at any time, without having to "create something out of nothing" aimlessly; daily creative hotspots (non-complex ideas) can be done as soon as we think of them, without having to place work orders or go through layers of approval; resource exchange between brands, communication and cooperation with self-media KOLs, the corporate identity is more confident and easier to achieve, and there is no need to worry about price differences... Although it may not be professional enough, it is more focused, more efficient, less expensive, and more flexible and autonomous.

If many companies were previously fascinated by Durex's highly anticipated and classic self-media cases, companies are now very pragmatic and prefer Haier Blue V, which holds real power and has the support of hundreds of people.

So, for those young people who are determined to engage in self-media operations, do you know where your future will lie? Have you thought about when is the right time for you to jump to the corporate client?

4. Traditional advertising/PR companies are becoming less and less, and Omni-Channel is a must-have competitive advantage for communication agencies

(To: Agency Owners & Employees)

I believe many bosses of traditional agency companies have already discovered this. Nowadays, there are very few companies that still claim to be advertising/public relations companies, and they have all changed their name to communication companies. In 2018, the boundaries of promotion forms, media and resources will become increasingly blurred, and everything will serve the purpose of "competing for consumers' attention time." If a communication agency wants to gain the favor of corporate clients and establish long-term, in-depth cooperation, in addition to having a particular skill, it must also max out its omni -channel , all-communication operational skills. Gone are the days when advertising, PR, and digital marketing agencies would sit in a row waiting for the marketing department to cut their piece of the pie.

Insight: Supplier directories are no longer an insurance policy for agency companies. It is no longer a matter of an advertising company entering the corporate supplier list and beating other advertising companies with creativity and price to get the advertising video shooting business. It is possible that it will be included in the digital marketing communication plan early on and become one of the fuses to detonate the campaign. Nowadays, business distribution has become that whichever agency has the ability to think in the whole communication and lead the whole communication can make the first cut, and the bigger the piece of meat it can get, while other cooperating agencies can only pick some bones to make soup.

Therefore, under the holistic communication mindset, communication agencies need both generalists with vision and thinking, and specialists with strong professionalism and amazing skills. Which one of them do you have the confidence to be?

5. A team with a mix of professional skills is the most attractive feature of a creative hot shop

(To: Creative companies & employees)

Creative hot shops are not a new concept, but what exactly are the independence, competitiveness and value that creative hot shops claim to have compared to traditional advertising companies? Everyone seems to have different opinions.

Insight: The “creativity” I want to talk about here is not just the creative insight and high-quality graphic design of a certain commercial. Instead, it is a true, all-round "creativity" that breaks away from the constraints of advertising concepts and gets closer and deeper to corporate products. It may be an innovative function of the product, an interesting service experience, or even an upgrade of the sales model... To match this, the creative team will no longer be just people in the advertising and communication circle. Those joining the team may be engineers, scientists, artists, financial personnel, psychologists... They understand business better, and after receiving the company's big proposition brief (such as designing a high-profit juice product), they will not stick to a certain field, but rely on the comprehensive skills of the partners in the team to inspire each other's multi-dimensional thinking and attempts to finally make it come true.

So, imagine that in the near future, commercials shot by scientists, offline activities designed by doctors, and new product features developed by artists, will have stronger innovation and creativity, bring better consumer feedback and sales performance, and will no longer be considered "for fun" and "promotional gimmicks"... By then, orthodox creative people, will your skills still be able to keep your job in the future? Will creative hot shops at that time still be considered as streamlined versions of advertising agencies?

6. The value of Marketing beyond communication will continue to be explored

(To: Enterprise Party A boss & Marketing Department)

When companies begin to emphasize returning to the essence of business, the subtext is that business is becoming increasingly difficult. This is bad news for many marketing departments, because the marketing budget that can be allocated to the market is getting smaller and smaller, and the risk of each project being challenged is increasing.

On the other hand, when communication agencies can complete the "communication tasks" more perfectly and efficiently, has the value of the marketing department also been eroded to almost nothing? What is the value of the marketing department? It is estimated that many business owners or marketing managers have thought about this and had headaches about it. When times are good, the company considers the mission of the marketing department to be the icing on the cake. They can publicize the brand image and good news of the company internally and externally with great fanfare, at least making the boss look good when entertaining outside. When times are bad, the company hopes that the marketing department will be a commando team that can help the company find a way out of trouble and find new breakthroughs.

But how many marketing people, when they are given high hopes during the difficult times of the company, only realize clearly that apart from branding and communication, they have long lost or do not possess other skills at all, and they even have a superficial understanding of the conceptual scope of marketing… Take the oldest 4P theory as an example: Product, Price , Place, Promotion. Apart from the promotion part, have you really participated in, thought about, and promoted the other three parts? A new product is about to be launched on the market. Are you confident, capable, and knowledgeable enough to work out a reasonable selling price for the new product from several dimensions? These are the most interesting and valuable aspects of "marketing".

So please remember, the existence of the marketing department is not to steal business from agencies/save creative fees, but to think and evaluate under a deeper market logic, and then point out the direction of marketing for the company, for yourself, and for the agency.

7. Going against Big Idea and Big Campaign, Lean Marketing is the key to success

(To: Enterprise Party A boss & Marketing Department)

Almost all marketers and organizations have tried to solve the problem of how to measure, evaluate, and predict the effectiveness of each marketing activity . The essence of this is to prove that marketing is a science. Unfortunately, this proposition has not been established to this day. In my opinion, measuring the impact of marketing effectiveness is like "using a formula to calculate the success rate of startups under a new business model ." It's just talk. This also explains to some extent why some marketing veterans advocate the "Big Idea" (if you can't measure the speed of influence, then try to run at full speed at the starting line).

But unfortunately, later marketers copied others and turned marketing into a perfunctory "Big Idea" + "Big Campaign". However, every campaign involves doing repetitive work over and over again, which not only wastes a lot of energy and opportunities, but also unfortunately does not allow any experience to be retained or accumulated. This is also why in the past two years the industry has begun to advocate replacing CMO with CGO, and replacing previous marketing models with big data , programmatic, and growth hacking methods... This seems to have fallen into another obsession and extreme.

I have a lot to say about lean marketing. I will first introduce the concept of lean marketing here, and then we will discuss it in depth in several articles in the future.

8. The concept of brand personality is revived, helping brand asset management

(To: Party A & Party B)

In the past two years, with the upgrading of consumption and the continuous emergence of new fields and new enterprises, we can personally feel that the marketing awareness and creative ability of local brands have increased rapidly. Whether it is high-end, brainwashing, heart-wrenching, or unscrupulous promotion and communication, local brands are becoming more and more able to attract attention and discussion. Many companies have dared to give relatively clear and specific instructions to their agencies in marketing communications - "We want to be the Durex of xx industry", rather than "Give me a video/event that is as popular as Durex".

I think it is under such instructions that different agencies have become distinctive and capable, such as a certain alphabetical company that excels in H5 creative production, a certain creative hot shop that excels in controversial videos, and a certain self-media organization with a strong literary and artistic style... It is no longer difficult to create communication projects with content and traffic for corporate brands.

However, whether it is the corporate marketing department or the agency, can they go a step further in 2018 and think about what kind of brand personality and brand assets each corporate brand should retain? If a brand is still very artistic and high-brow one second, but starts to brainwash consumers in the next second, will it make consumers think that the brand is schizophrenic, thus causing the brand's "personality to collapse"?

Therefore, I suggest that all business owners play the game more and see if there is any character that can sweep the opponent without looking at the character guide, but by simply brushing up the skill points and equipment? This is true for games, business, and brands. There are many good things, but only by selectively absorbing them can your brand become more outstanding, and that is your brand personality and brand assets.

~ Above ~

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