2020 has been an exciting and challenging year for the marketing sector. It is the year that has pushed the field to be more creative and innovative in order to connect with its audience. It has also led to the emergence of various new trends and given marketers in-depth insights into what their audience really wants from each brand. Below are three trends we see emerging in 2020 that will shape the industry over the coming years.
HUMANISED APPROACH
Audiences are increasingly wanting their brands to be humanised. They want the brand to have a unique personality and characteristics that set the brand apart. They want their brands to be relatable and authentic.
Companies that do want to use a humanised approach need to start by studying their target audience and identifying what traits they relate to best. These should be incorporated in all kinds of marketing communication being promoted by the brand. The team leading the marketing and communications should be briefed on the same so that these qualities are reflected by the team while interacting with the target audience.
FUSION AND BEYOND
Collaborations and fusions with brands sharing similar values is another trend on the rise in 2020. A great example of this fusion concerns Selfridges, a premium departmental store in the UK. They recently built an in-store experience to cater to a wider range of their audience’s needs. The department store on Oxford Street introduced a space dedicated to fitness and health and partnered with BXR to offer boxing classes in store as an extension to it.
Such collaborations are great for all the brands involved as these introduce the brands to a targeted clientele that is already interested in similar products and services.
MARKETING TRENDS SHAPING 2020 AND BEYOND AGILE MARKETING
Agile marketing is another new concept we’ve seen emerging in 2020. The idea is to use a framework that can enable organisations to move closer to their target customers by helping them embrace adaptive thinking and structure cross-functional teams so as to increase their speed, quality, flexibility and effectiveness in reacting to moments in the market. This concept draws its key principles from the agile software development concept.
Agile marketing can be used in conjunction with artificial intelligence to predict and generate meaningful engagements with customers in near real time. It helps push content creation a step or two beyond by offering an organisational model by which businesses can quickly design, create and launch marketing campaigns.
