Key Trends in Mar­ket­ing, includ­ing AI and Tay­lor Swift

In the webi­nar ​“What’s the ​“Big Idea?” Key Trends in Mar­ket­ing — and Where AI Fits In” mod­er­at­ed by Ann Han­d­ley, Sales­force’s very human Mar­tin Kihn dis­cussed ​“big ideas” for mar­keters to con­sid­er this year. And Tay­lor Swift.

Here’s a brief sum­ma­ry and some notes on the key trends in mar­ket­ing in 2024:

The dif­fer­ence between B2B and B2C is the approach to data itself. Account object vs a per­son. But of course, B2C, B2B, DTC, B2B2C and com­bi­na­tions there­of, are all ulti­mate­ly B2P. Busi­ness to people.

Com­pa­nies are expect­ed to engage through dig­i­tal chan­nels, and to do so in an enter­tain­ing way. The key is being rec­og­niz­able, hav­ing a sto­ry, a nar­ra­tive, and good, per­son­al, pol­ished con­tent. Best per­form­ing B2B brands are very approach­able, their videos are clear, their copy is sim­ple and straightforward.

Bad tim­ing I guess.

Now that the robot learns how to write, we don’t want to read any­more. From the super text-heavy 90s Inter­net to the cur­rent Tik­Tok effect which is also a design trend, we have reached the age of the post ver­bal consumer.

Almost zero tol­er­ance for friction.

80% of cus­tomers will drop a brand after three fric­tion strikes. 30% won’t even wait that long. Cou­ple of things to watch out for: slow page load times and check­out issues.

Atti­tudes and con­text mat­ter much more than generations.

There are more dif­fer­ences between demo­graph­ic cohorts than between them. Cf Aus­tralian Lamb, also dis­pel­ing the Gen­er­a­tion Gap myth by focus­ing on what dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tions have in common.

Every­body lies in surveys.

And every­where else, accord­ing to Gre­go­ry House, but that’s more or less the idea. Sur­veys can’t real­ly be trust­ed. We don’t answer what we real­ly think but what we’d like to think, what we think peo­ple will like or react bet­ter to. There­fore, sur­veys should be tak­en with at least a pinch of salt and mar­keters must focus on see­ing what peo­ple do, not so much what they say.

We don’t know how we feel about data.

2024 is the death of the cook­ie, but no one knows the dif­fer­ence or impli­ca­tions of first vs third par­ty cook­ies. And that leads to para­noia. Peo­ple have been increas­ing­ly inter­est­ed in search­ing the con­cept of ​“track­ing”, which peaked in 2018 dur­ing the hear­ings in the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca mess.

Speak­ing about that, the pri­va­cy para­dox is very real. It’s a dis­con­nec­tion between what peo­ple say about their data and what they do about it, and we can look back to 2018 when Apple decid­ed to become the neigh­bor­hood watch of the Inter­net and embraced the opt-in, with Google fol­low­ing suit. How can we decide to opt in or out of an expe­ri­ence we haven’t had yet? It seems the trick to solve the para­dox is popularity.

Trust feels good

The high­er lev­el of trust, the more sat­is­fied cus­tomers are with the brand. Trust is cor­re­lat­ed with sat­is­fac­tion, and so is ease of use.

The con­sumer is not you

Per­haps she is not your wife, as David Ogilvy said, but the con­sumer is def­i­nite­ly not YOU. In the Holy Name of Mark Rit­son, may this be the year when mar­keters final­ly real­ize most peo­ple are creeped out, or at best, unin­ter­est­ed in what we tend to con­sid­er super cool per­son­al­ized marketing.

Putting your mon­ey where exactly?

Where your ana­lyt­ics are. The best mar­ket­ing invest­ment is ana­lyt­ics. You can get a high­er ROI than in oth­er areas for spend­ing in Ana­lyt­ics, includ­ing tal­ent, tools, process­es and partnerships.

Of course, AI.

It does change things. And it requires change too. Mar­keters need to get bet­ter at being pre­cise and ask­ing good ques­tions well. Minor changes in the prompt can lead to major changes in the out­put. Key word: refining.

LLMs are com­modi­ties that need refine­ment because any­thing avail­able to your com­peti­tors is not a source of com­pet­i­tive dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion. So the thing is to train these pow­er­ful mod­els on some­thing your com­peti­tors don’t have, such as your first par­ty, com­pa­ny data.

Whose 1PD is it anyway?

Con­sumer prod­uct com­pa­nies don’t usu­al­ly have 1PD, as retail­ers are the ones engag­ing with clients. The good secret is the 1PD doesn’t have to be your own.

Data attracts data.

And data needs to be orga­nized to be use­ful. What is every­one else doing? Invest­ing on this.

Where are we now?

• Since the pan­dem­ic, mar­ket­ing has been get­ting even more impor­tant, and this is both good and bad, because pres­sure is high­er than ever now.
• Cus­tomer Data Plat­form as a cat­e­go­ry is look­ing like CRM. It has evolved beyond being just a tool to become cen­tral to entre­prise and at the heart of busi­ness strategy.
• Enter­prise tech stack needs to be more open and this is where com­pos­abil­i­ty comes in. Build­ing blocks, mod­ules, all things flexibility.

And final­ly, a les­son from Tay­lor Swift, a mas­sive­ly suc­cess­ful brand among very diverse groups of people.

Mar­t­in’s online sur­vey revealed 80% of peo­ple either love her, like her or are warm­ly indif­fer­ent to her, where­as 20% said they did not like her. The fol­low up ques­tions for that 20% had to do with their feel­ings and state of mind, 80% of whom revealed they were not hap­py. The con­clu­sion is that peo­ple who hate Tay­lor Swift hate life.

The secret of her suc­cess is that peo­ple project them­selves onto her. Every­one can see in her what they want. This also applies to big com­pa­nies and brands and pos­si­bly explains why cats ‑with con­stant rest­ing cat face- still rule the Internet.

Final Tips on Key Mar­ket­ing Trends

• Every busi­ness is now ​“show busi­ness”, so set out to enter­tain, and make expe­ri­ences as fun as possible.
• Get good at mak­ing short form videos, because it is the most impor­tant com­mu­ni­ca­tion skill to mas­ter at the moment.
• Put more trust in what peo­ple do than in what they say
• Build a brand that is flex­i­ble enough so peo­ple can see them­selves in it. Tay­lor style.