MICHAEL'S PICKS FOR THE 20s

Predicting the future is a mug’s game. How can anyone catch the crazy and filter the themes? But not looking forward is the fastest way to go backwards. So here’s my pick on big themes for the next ten years in marketing.

Some of them are safe bets, others more like wishful thinking. And I’ve wrapped them all up in pretentious made up words, because this is marketing, right?

HUMANCENTRICITY

We’ve seen ten years of putting the customer at the heart of everything with impressive results. The next ten will go to the next level. Gradually, we’ll lose passion for the big C job-title acronyms and discover that Customer is actually a business-centric word.

No one I know considers themselves a ‘customer’. We’re people. ‘Humans’ if you like the zeitgeist language. Winning brands will pick up on this distinction. And the smart ones will find places to create value within a core understanding that nobody really cares. For most people, the brands we choose play a massively insignificant role in our lives.

ASK YOURSELF: Why will anyone care? No, really?

EASIFICATION

Building on the idea that nobody cares, people nearly always try to do what’s easiest. So bombarding them with brilliant reasons to take your path will have far less impact than a competitor who makes everything an easy stroll.

If action is a function of simplicity and awareness over price there are three obvious places to invest. We can cut margins to make stuff cheaper. We can push messaging to raise awareness. Or we can genuinely make stuff easier and take the easy win.

ASK YOURSELF: How do we make this easier? Like, actually?

TALENT REASPORAH

Agencies and clients have been changing the way they work in opposite ways. While the agency world has seen years of fracturing and hyper-specialisation, clients have split their specialists up into cross-functional more generalist teams through methodologies like agile. Both make sense and can add value. Neither work perfectly, yet.

Where it goes wrong is that specialist agencies in a contracting market often take on projects outside of their skillset, thereby chipping their own credibility and that of the industry at large. Meanwhile, squad-level cross-functional teams with separated specialists make it hard to develop core skills day to day, in a learn-on-the-job way.

The next decade should see agencies come back together in different ways to build credible generalist offerings with deep specialist skillsets, while clients will evolve agile to recognise the talent-at-scale advantages of specialist squads within a cross-functional, agile business.

ASK YOURSELF: Am I really the most qualified person to nail this job?

HYPERCRAFTISM

Ten years ago people would be exposed to 500 advertising messages a day. Today it’s more like 5,000. How many do you remember? It’s a safe bet that the ones that land are the messages that make you think or better yet, make you feel. More often than not, they’ll be beautifully crafted.

With new technology and channel proliferation, anyone can communicate anything at any time. Premium brands will recognise this and invest in the value of craft to create emotional connections and cement memories through moments and feels.

ASK YOURSELF: Have we made something we’re really proud of?

AUTO-HUMANISM

Marketing Automation tools will continue to proliferate on the promise of more contact for less money. But smart businesses will realise that the ongoing development of AI Spam machines will deliver rapidly diminishing returns. There’s a win in simplified service channels. And a bigger one in turning automated leads into human moments of service and surprise.

Data-led strategies are still the go. But the killer app is to craft your AI to genuinely understand someone’s activity and drive those relevant moments of value add. With robots that give humans the info to connect, empathise and genuinely help, people will feel looked after and love it.

ASK YOURSELF: Is my robot working for me? Or can it be impressing my customer?

DEMETRICISING

If you count it, it counts. And we only count what counts. The fun of a word that’s both a verb and noun is that these simple adages flow freely – round in circles. It’s not nearly that simple. And yet it is.

While the beautiful thing about digital channels is that you can count just about anything, the challenge is that many of those metrics are irrelevant and some of them are junk.

Over the next ten years, the winners will stop reframing the frame and start looking at the bigger picture. Likes, views, CTRs and NPS tell you lots about how people click and less about how they tick. Your sales figures tell you if you’re in business.  

If last decade’s consistent brief was ‘build a dashboard’, this decade should see those dashboards simplified into two core metrics. Do people like us? And are they buying our stuff?

ASK YOURSELF: Does what we’re counting matter big picture?

RETURN-OF-MOUTH

I reckon the biggest trend of the 20s will be a hard-core return to word of mouth. It never went away, but lots of us forgot its beautiful simplicity on the path to counting clicks and buying followers. If someone likes a particular show or a shoe or local café or brand of milk, they’ll be happy to tell their friends and their friends are more likely to buy it.

Of course, we all know this. That’s why we’ve spent a decade trying to digitise and monetise the purest form of advertising. But the challenge with digital influence is trust. It’s a bigger challenge in the age of ‘post-truth’ media, where nobody knows what to trust any more. So who do they turn to? Their friends.

So how do you harness the power of the personal sales force? It’s simple. You make good stuff. Like, really good stuff. Products and services that people actually like enough tell their friends about. Just like always.

ASK YOURSELF: Am I selling something people will want to buy?

All that in a nutshell?

In summary, I reckon the next ten years will be all about the humans. Getting the best people doing the best work on every project. Putting the human at the heart of it. Counting what really counts for real people. And making stuff they want to tell their friends about.

Or as we like to say, making stuff easy, excellent and fun.

That’s what I reckon, what do you think?