The emergence and use of mobile devices is the consumer trend that North American marketers believe will have the greatest impact on their industries in the next 10 years, according to survey results from the New York American Marketing Association (NYAMA) and BrandSpark, in association with Dapresy.
This result follows other pieces of research (such as this and this) which have also pointed to mobile as being among the most impactful future trends, although those studies didn’t focus on consumer trends.
Trailing mobile among the most influential consumer trends are three others commonly discussed: the emergence of Millennials (see just how many there are here); advanced marketing analytics; and demand for personalization.
While not perceived to have quite the same impact as Millennials, the aging population also figures among the top 10 consumer trends, per respondents to the survey. Emerging technologies such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence and wearables lie outside of the top 10 consumer trends, outweighed by other shifts including a focus on shopping experience and direct-to-consumer models.
To respond to these trends, marketers are taking a variety of actions, ranging from forming strategic partnerships (54%) to increasing technological capacity (51%) and engaging in dialogue with consumers (48%). That consumer dialogue is a critical focus for enterprise social business initiatives, and is also being increasingly used by CMOs to shape innovation.
Returning to mobile, the study indicates that marketers are tackling this consumer trend by increasing their use of mobile marketing strategies. While just 38% report having a mobile marketing strategy in place, another 28% plan to implement one within the next 12 months.
That makes mobile marketing one of the most widely planned strategies for implementation in the coming year, trailing only strategies surrounding the increasing use of marketing technology (42%), influencer marketing (31%), data management and analytics (31%) and online video (30%), all of which are also important in various ways.
Overall, email marketing (74%) and social marketing (73%) are the channels in which the most respondents already have a strategy in place. CRM/email marketing (44%) and social network advertising (49%) are also among the initiatives for which the largest share of marketers plan budget increases next year, trailing only online video, on which half of respondents plan to hike their spending.
Once again, the only channels in which more respondents plan to decrease than increase spending are traditional channels, including direct mail (23% decreasing; 12% increasing); out-of-home advertising (11% vs. 8%), broadcast TV (10% vs. 7%), print circulars/flyers (21% vs. 7%); print magazines (21% vs. 6%); broadcast radio (11% vs. 5%); and print newspapers (18% vs. 3%).
These seem to be tied to ROI perceptions, which tended to be weaker for traditional than digital channels.
Not all of these spending shifts are likely to come to fruition, though: research suggests that spending on out-of-home advertising, broadcast TV and broadcast radio is likely to increase over the next few years, even as print ad spending declines. Further, tilting spending too heavily away from traditional channels might not be wise, given research indicating that TV and print are among the most influential advertising media – at least in consumers’ minds…
About the Data: The results are based on a survey of 661 marketers in North America across a range of industries and age groups.
