It’s December in the marketing world and the race to predict the future is in full swing.
This rush often overshadows the need to reflect on the present and address ongoing challenges. Before adding to the influx of predictions posts you’ll see this month, we’re shining a light on overlooked, fast-moving areas crucial for marketing strategy. Here’s what we still need to work on in 2024:
Reining in Purpose
Brands must stop pretending to save the world and find an authentic way to do it. There is clear value in CSR, but after years of “purpose marketing” headlining op-eds and strategy meetings, we’re still not aligned on its relation to building brand equity.
Edelman’s 2023 Trust Barometer showed that “belief-driven buyers” (those who say they buy or advocate for brands based on their social or political stands) now make up 65% of U.S. consumers. On the other hand, research from GfK shows over 50% of U.S. consumers can’t name a single brand impacting such issues.
A deep dive from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising helps explain the discrepancy: brand purpose campaigns drive 15% more market share growth than non-purpose campaigns – but only if they are well executed. Poorly executed purpose campaigns, however, perform even worse than non-purpose campaigns.
To get purpose right, embed it in your physical presence and products, align it directly with your category or audience, and build credibility over time. Strengthen category entry points and avoid jumping on causes where your brand has no history. In this space, it's also important to continuously monitor data – what people say and how they behave is always subject to change.
Reframing Loyalty
Loyalty was a hot topic in 2023, attracting significant investment from brands across categories. Yet economic pressure led to cutbacks in traditional program perks, sparking consumer backlash. To navigate this, brands must redefine loyalty and think beyond freebies.
While, yes, most people want freebies from their loyalty programs, research from PwC shows that personalized recommendations also matter. This includes remembering consumers’ preferences, offering discounts on products they regularly use, and providing exclusive access to things they like.
Personalization is enabled by data collection, and getting there can be a springboard for digital creativity. Traditional email form fills and quizzes are a great start, but brands should also try tying more unique, Gen Z-friendly approaches like AR lenses and VR experiences to their first-party data strategies.
Prioritizing personalization and thinking strategically across your whole brand experience will help grow frequency with existing customers and provide value for new ones.
Benchmarks vs. Breakthrough
In the increasingly digital and measurable marketing world, data on “what works” is everywhere. While guidelines are important, they are just that – guidance. Some of today’s most successful work has eschewed the expected, a reminder that great creative ideas don’t come from rigid ideals.
Take the widely-praised 10-minute TikTok from Hilton Hotels. At the time, best practices would have scoffed at something longer than 90 seconds, citing Gen Z’s short attention span and the prevalence of “snackable” content. Instead of following the norm, Hilton masterfully created something that broke the rules yet was still custom-made for the platform.
The success of campaigns like this are rooted in thinking beyond best practices, recognizing there is more than one way to tap into audience behaviors. And often, some collaboration with platform partners can unearth unexplored capabilities and ad products that can be used in valuable ways.
Best practices provide a foundation, but breakthrough work requires thinking beyond these norms. Otherwise, you’re optimizing for average.
Media’s Old Unsolved Problem
The media buying ecosystem is full of fraud – it’s an old unsolved problem. And with more sophisticated technology comes more mature fraud that has outpaced and taken advantage of marketers’ established ways of working.
Four interconnected areas contribute to an ecosystem of fraud: bots producing false metrics, MFA sites leading marketers to invest in low-yield ads, audience networks exposing content up to low-quality inventory, and AI-Optimization products that, because of the factors above, can be tricked into optimizing for fraud.
We need to recognize, as Dr. Augustine Fou said, that we have grown accustomed to seeing “irrationally large quantities of ads to buy, irrationally low CPM prices, and irrationally high click rates.” This makes the fraud hard to disrupt.
But it can and should be addressed. Marketers can start by focusing on human metrics, not ad metrics, and consider developing focused experimentation around whitelists, blocklists and post-buy ad verification. While disrupting the current state may lead to seemingly lower metrics initially, it’s a necessary step for a healthier advertising ecosystem. As the year concludes, you start thinking about 2024, and take some time to curl up with a good trends report, remember the importance of addressing current challenges. Success in the fast-paced world of marketing requires an openness to new thinking and a commitment to interrogating the old ways of doing things.
