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[2010 trends] What's in store for marketing, media?

By Chris Moerdyk

11 Jan 2010

So what does 2010 hold in store for marketing and media, especially as we should be beginning to move out of the recession and as we gear up for the 2010 FIFA World Cup? Here are 10 predictions for 2010.

[2010 trends] What's in store for marketing, media?

Getting closer to the consumer: brand managers will look towards marketing strategies that involve closer contact with the consumer. In-store marketing that gained impetus in 2009 will continue to grow apace as marketers choose face-to-face strategies over faceless shotgun approaches.
Social media: with the cost of Internet access and cellphone usage coming down, however slowly, consumers will resort more and more to sharing their purchase experiences with their personal networks and a growing number of consumer complaint websites. Retailers of goods and services will have to monitor these to avoid being caught up in an e-tsunami of consumer backlash, as has happened in the US and UK.
Measurement: with the cost of marketing, particularly mass media advertising, having sky-rocketed during the past few years, more and more marketers will be under pressure to prove campaign results. The days of trusting instinct are long gone. Boards of directors will want to see results and not promises.
The big idea: the recession will have effectively killed the notion of relying purely on a "big idea" for marketing success. 2010 will be the start of a move toward pragmatic marketing, featuring built-in measurement tools and the use of logic, technology and common sense. Put it this way, for marketing to work efficiently in future, it will have to be conducted in a way that accountants can quite easily understand.
Online advertising will continue to grow: the only media type to have actually grown during the recession, online advertising will continue to make inroads into the advertising and marketing budget pies. Already in the UK, last September, online advertising passed TV to take top spot. But, the growth in online advertising will also mean a paradigm shift in the way advertising is constructed. Online will start demanding a completely different approach to that of conventional media.
Online media: newspapers will wake up to the fact that taking advantage of online is not just a question of reproducing their print products online. That was a massive mistake in the past and effectively just ended up with newspaper giving content away for free to the detriment of their print products. Newspapers will start to reassess their online presence or simply go bust.
Media convergence: if we do get faster Internet and much wider bandwidth, South Africa could see media convergence beginning to take effect by the end of 2010. Which will mean massive mindset changes among media companies whose newsrooms will be filled with content providers to a variety of media rather than print, radio or TV journalists.
The 30-second commercial: South Africa will remain one of the world's last bastions of faith in the 30-second TV commercial. However, given the demand on marketing to become more measureable, more and more big brands can be expected to move away from the very expensive and largely un-measureable mass media shotgun approach to something much more focused. Perhaps 2010 will be the year that branded TV really takes off as a far more effective, efficient and cheaper option to the 30-sec commercial. Don't hold your breath, though. There are still far too many unskilled brand managers around who continue to be convinced that the 30-sec commercial still works.
Customer service: it can generally be expected that 2010, being hopefully the first post-recession year, will be one in which marketers and senior corporate executives start taking consumers seriously. Maybe this will be the year when South African companies realise that saying "WE CARE" to consumers means absolutely nothing to them.
2010 and the FIFA World Cup will provide a lesson to companies and their marketers that it is better to offer good value at a good price rather than a once off rip-off.

Chris Moerdyk

About Chris Moerdyk

Apart from being a corporate marketing analyst, advisor and media commentator, Chris Moerdyk is a former chairman of Bizcommunity. He was head of strategic planning and public affairs for BMW South Africa and spent 16 years in the creative and client service departments of ad agencies, ending up as resident director of Lindsay Smithers-FCB in KwaZulu-Natal. Email Chris on moc.liamg@ckydreom and follow him on Twitter at @chrismoerdyk.