Innovation Zen

Marketing is changing a lot lately. Just think about blogs, social networks and the like. What should we expect for 2007 though? The Marketing and Strategy Innovation blog has a nice article covering the top 10 marketing trends for the coming years (in my opinion some trends are missing, but the ones mentioned are worth the reading), here they are:

1) Authenticity: authenticity, honesty, ‘realness’ should have been at the top of this list for the past 10 years – but it seems as if it is actually breaking through now.

2) Net Promoter Scores: forget marketing research, it is all about: “on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend brand/product X to someone else?”

3) Buzztracking: what’s being said about me? Why is nobody talking about me?

4) From segmentation to insights: it is not about age or income but rather about the tasks the customer is trying to perform.

5) Green: if even WalMart is starting to promote eco-friendliness, where will it stop?

6) Grey: marketers are waking up to the fact that the older demographic is a major opportunity.

7) Co-creation: the power of harnessing your customers’ insights.

8) Experimentational budgets: marketers are realizing that they will have to set a portion of their marketing budgets aside for well structured experiments.

9) The Return of the Soap: as the consumers aversion to traditional 30′’ spots is starting to hurt, TV channels and advertisers alike have to look for different models.

10) More CGA: Consumer Generated Advertising. Let your customers not only be your Promoters, but actually make your advertising for you.

You can read the full article here.