
(Slideshare) The Future of Marketing — What will marketing look like in 2021?
Based on accurate tracking and spatial computing, smartphones can provide an accurate picture of their environment. This allows to add images through augmented reality. Google has been working with Google Tango for a number of years to optimize this and also brings more and more devices on the market that have deep and space views. Apple with their Apple ARKit are going to amaze us from september 2017 onward.
With this exact location, you can for example exactly pinpoint, guide and find the location of something in a store.
Retailers of stores are increasingly forced to bring digital, virtual and physical together. They need to become hybrid retailers: virtual store, e-commerce webshop and interactive store. And all of that connected to each other.
What will the future of marketing look like in 2021?
With all these mega-trends in mind, how will marketing as a discipline look in just a few years?
Everything will be about technology
As has been evident for a number of years, marketing is increasingly becoming a technical discipline. IBM with IBM Watson brings the domain of artificial intelligence closer to marketers under the form of an API. Feel free to think in terms of “apps” that we can start using in our marketing environment.
It’s the “appification” of Artificial Intelligence.
Also Google is working on an open source platform (Tensorflow) that brings machine learning and artificial intelligence possibilities towards an ever-growing community of developers.
From products to experiences
Customers want to more and more experiences. As a brand, we must think how we can bring these experiences on top of or as part of our existing products and services.
There are already a lot of examples, mostly big brands, of how experiences can be brought on top of products:
- Marriott, which offers customers through VR their hotels for those who visit.
- Autodesk showcased customer designs to demonstrate their technology.
- A Bulldozer firm that allows customers to “play” in a giant sandbox.
- The Northface that allows customers to test their products in VR environment.
From brands to open platforms
Pushing your brand to customers does not work anymore, that much we know. Everyone trusts his friends more than brands when deciding on a purchase. As a consequence, brands must speak to the individual. Yes I’m talking personalization. Future marketers understand this and get closer to their customers and even bring in customers who help them.
Therefore, brands need to build digital connectivity with their customers and evolve into open platforms and ecosystems, rather than closed systems. If you ever had to deal with an API, you know what I mean.
There are already many frontrunner examples on the market that explain what I mean:
- Think of Nike who has opened their Nike+ platform to an eco-system of developers & hardware developers.
- Flavorprint from McCormick sells herbs and made a website, where the platform can learns the taste preferences of their customers, and then make personal suggestions on that basis.
- Gillette has a platform that connects with men (you take a picture of your face, and you can try different types of beards in a virtual way). After that, you can get in touch with 3rd party product suppliers and even body grooming experts.
- General Electric adds more and more sensors to their products, and through an open platform (called Predix), developers can contribute to the power of the platform.
What will your marketing job look like in 2021?
Marketing organizations have changed little over the past 40 years. That’s going to change dramatically…
Top 5 Skills needed in 2021
Anything that can be digitized and automated will be replaced by some form of artificial intelligence. But the reverse is also true. Anything that can not be digitized and automated will become extremely valuable.
Critical thinking and creativity are difficult to digitize and automate, and as such these skills become very valuable to companies and employers. Start preparing for the future of marketing right now by thinking how you will introduce these skillsets into your organization.
Liquid team structures
Due to the rapid evolution of technology and higher amount of (digital) communication channels, marketing teams will have to be able to respond to innovations faster and faster.
Marketing teams will therefore need the following features:
- Multi-disciplinary teams with flexible roles and changing responsibilities;
- Created and assembled to take speed, make quick decisions, take calculated risks, and make creative use of art, science, data and technology;
- Teams that are dismantled fast, and quickly deployed or morphed to fit other projects or programs.
Strategic thinkers become very important
With the internet and technology taking an ever prominent place in the strategy of companies, brands have created new digital channels and media.
Today, these new media and channels need more volume and speed, and there is a need for a new strategic role: the Chief Content Officer of CCO.
A chief content officer (CCO) is responsible for the creation of digital media and its publication in a multi-channel environment. He is also responsible for the internal organization around text, video, audio, animation, etc.
Because of the speed in which everything evolves, we also need more “big picture thinking”: people who can see a pattern out a lot of information and noise, and then distillate the relevant trends for their business.
More creativity in strategy, data and execution
In 2021 creativity will become more and more important.
And this on all levels:
- Creativity in bringing experiences
- Creativity in promoting your products
- Creativity in using data
- Creativity in the use of technology
Perhaps we need artists and designers in the management team?
How can you prepare for 2021?
The race towards technology, experiences, platforms and creativity has begun.
But how do you make your internal organization, your marketing technology and your brand ready for the future of marketing?
In the past I have written about modern marketing organizations, accelerating marketing innovationadoption, and personalization.
Those are just 2 elements that you’ll probably need. But there’s more… I guess that will take another blog post.
Thank you for reading this post until the end!
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Warm regards from sunny Belgium !
Tom De Baere
Originally published at www.b2bmarketingexperiences.com on July 10, 2017.
