Every year I pick out the digital and marketing trends and developments which I believe will shape the industry and digital/marketing planning and thinking in the year ahead.
In our Modern Marketing Model (M3), ‘Data & Measurement’ is arguably the only completely new element introduced compared to previous models like the 4Ps. As it is new it is the least well understood and scoped.
Each year I pick out marketing and digital trends and developments which I believe are interesting and will shape the industry and digital/marketing planning and thinking in the year ahead.
Looking at 2018 I have to say that I think pretty much all of what I wrote about in my 2017 trends piece still applies. So, either not that much has changed or I was ahead of myself last year.
The increase in new channels and technologies has dramatically changed the environment in which marketers operate. But the way in which marketing is taught, understood and operates has not really changed.
This is not sustainable. We need a new unifying framework as a reference for what marketing has become.
My brother Joe asked to interview me about digital transformation for his ‘Digital Brew‘ series. The guests get to choose between tea/coffee or beer. I went with beer.
Every year I pick out digital and marketing trends and developments which I think will shape the industry and digital/marketing planning and thinking in the year ahead.
You may have noticed the rise in subscription services and business models – the likes of Spotify in music, Netflix in video and, of course, Dollar Shave Club in FMCG, which was recently bought by Unilever for $1bn.
On US-based My Subscription Addiction, a portal detailing available subscription services, there were 2,000 in operation as of March this year. And visits to subscription ecommerce sites have gone up 3,000% in the past three years. The average subscriber receives seven subscription packages and has at least 12 on their wish list.
The great debate about ‘digital’ rumbles on.
On one side, we hear that digital is everything and everything is digital, so it is now a meaningless term, but this week I am coming out fighting for the other side because digital is a force that deserves distinction.
Ah, the death of digital… More than two years ago I wrote about the many ‘deaths’ of digital marketing and it felt like a tired topic then.
But still this is a hot topic, even if it has often morphed into full blown ‘digital transformation’.
Clearly it is not new to think of marketing as conversations.
In the Cluetrain Manifesto of 1999 Doc Searls and David Weinberger remind us that markets are conversations.
Each year I select digital trends and developments which I believe will shape the industry and digital marketing planning and thinking.
These are a personal selection, so are somewhat esoteric and likely skewed to those which most interest me.
And each year there seem to be a different number.
In my previous article I looked at the rise of the Chief Digital Officer.
However, in that piece I suggested that the “transformer CDO” is very similar to the Chief Customer Officer, the latter also seeing a dramatic rise in popularity in the last two years.