New Year’s revolutions — Key Story-Living trends for 2018

Story-Living. A term we have repeatedly spell-checked more than any other this year. But it’s one that has resonated with brands more than anything else as ‘experience’ has become the most valuable tool in the marketing arsenal.

As consumers look for experiential or uniquely memorable experience, we’re looking beyond brand narrative and thinking about brand drama. Giving audiences a role to play and a stage to play it. Or as we call it; Story-Living.

And as we bid farewell to this year and welcome in the new one, Story-Living is even more relevant in today’s customer-centric world. So, what will be the key themes and tech advancements in 2018? We’ve identified the movements of the moment, and have forecasted what will be big in the New Year for brands looking not just to tell their story, but to live it.

1. The rise of social shopping.

Mobile is changing shopping. Today it can feel like going from a shop window to the cash register. Missing the whole experience of engaging with brands, services or products.

Navigating the ‘skip ad’ culture, brands can now make social media much more enjoyable and shoppable. Instagram is focusing on making product research less complicated by pushing into shopping with new mobile tools. Instagram shopping allows users to seamlessly tap and shop the product — going from inspiration to information in just a few steps without having to interrupt their scrolling with a browser window.

For brands, this becomes a helpful online story-living tool. It lets shoppers more readily imagine a product as theirs and allows them to be more open to discovery and finding new inspiration. By pushing shopping into social media, brands can entice shoppers into their ecosystem through aspirational content and influencers that capitalises on the growing population of social shoppers.

2. Live broadcasting, and how brands are tuning into the trend.

Live broadcasting is tipped for future growth in 2018 and beyond. It enables participation, sharing and helps build communities. What makes it great is that it’s the ultimate FOMO killer. Working cohesively across online and offline channels it helps brands go from storytelling to story-living; they can broadcast behind the scenes and exclusive events to share footage that people wouldn’t otherwise get to experience first-hand.

By investing wisely and using live streaming in the right way, brands can create a huge impact. The likes of Red Bull have built entire images on their sense of adventure, using the likes of Facebook Live and immersive video to capture audience’s attention and raise engagement levels. More recently, Spotify attracted over 50,000 followers just by broadcasting a consistent cadence of exclusive #SpotifySessions and exclusive concert footage on Periscope.

3. Entertaining with tech; how brands can make the virtual world as compelling as the physical.

The momentum is building in alternative reality with VR, AR and AI becoming increasingly valuable to the intersection of digital and real-world experience. And unlike previous years, they are all ripe for mainstream adoption. It’s not gadget vs gadget, but ecosystem vs ecosystem.

The number of active virtual-reality users is forecast to reach 171 million in 2018, making immersive experiences more widely accessible than ever. Brands such as The Glenfiddich have turned to the immersive capabilities of virtual reality to help strengthen their reputation for innovation. Offering whisky drinkers the world over the chance to experience a virtual tour of its famous distillery.

Looking to the future, advances in alternative reality entertainment will provide brands with new opportunities to entertain their audiences. They will help break down geographical barriers to socialising and allow people to interact with friends across the globe, as well as giving them a chance to explore new brand worlds.

4. Home is where the heart is; responding to the desire to make homes the ultimate social venue.

The rise of voice technology platforms and the connected home has turned the discussion of a brand’s voice from metaphorical to physical. Voice as an interface is fast becoming a major piece of the digital ecosystem and will continue to build traction as people get used to talking to a machine — the current estimate is that they’ll be 1.8 billion users of voice digital assistants by 2021.

The nature of a personal AI assistant is that it will become more a part of everyday life until we’re surprised by how dependent we are on it. Acting as invisible gatekeepers, this technology forces brands to rethink how they target and talk to customers. A requirement to live stories in new ways and adopt new experiences to fit their environments and audiences.

That means personalities with more detail come to life in standard brand environments, ensuring content, engagement and experience stream neatly into commerce and transaction.

5. Be useful. Offering something different. Sell uniqueness.

When looking at today’s most organically shared brands, it’s clear that a new shift is happening. If the marketing of old positioned the brand as a teacher, today’s most celebrated brands are more like servants.

The likes of Airbnb, Uber, Google and GoPro humbly sit as the consumer’s subordinate — relied upon, useful and helpful. Their stories are lived, not told, through real-world behaviour, which is far more convincing than a piece of fiction.

Brands don’t need to change the world, but they can look to make small gestures — a helpful app, a useful tip, personal encouragement or even entertainment, if that answers the need. What matters is that they are ideas that live in the real world. Ideas for consumers who have a tsunami of other things that could be reading, watching or doing.

This is not the end. It’s just the beginning. We’ve living in an age of hyper change with the rules of customer engagement being rewritten almost daily and traditional media consumption constantly challenged. It means experiences are becoming the most relevant and meaningful way to connect and engage an audience. A positive experience not only raises awareness and increases ROI, it creates advocates, which is why it’s at the forefront of the modern marketing arena.

Tell us your story and together we can start to the right the next chapter in 2018.

Story-Living is a publication of Intermarketing Agency.