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As anyone who has ever walked into a supermarket to buy a gallon of milk and left with a cart full of impulse purchases knows all too well, grocery shopping can be a complicated process. To help brand marketers decode consumers’ path to purchase, Food Network Magazine partnered with research firm Open Mind Strategy to survey nearly 2,000 people (half of which were magazine subscribers) about their grocery shopping experiences, behaviors and attitudes. “It’s difficult to categorize consumers as one type of shopper or eater—they want it how they want it and when they want it,” said Food Network Magazine vp, publisher and CRO Vicki Wellington. “They’re also more attuned than ever to ingredients and packaging: Less is more in regard to ingredients, and clear or transparent packaging suggests wholesomeness and ‘better for you.’” And while the study found that e-commerce is growing, brick-and-mortar retailers need not despair just yet. “The majority of people still want to smell, see and choose their own products, particularly fruits and vegetables,” explained Wellington.
It’s only a few months into 2017, but brands are already making their presences known – in a big way. Concepts and visuals are stronger than ever in this year’s content marketing efforts. “We’re in a golden age of visuals, and content is king,” says Pam Grossman, Getty Images’ Director of Visual Trends. “2017 is all about images that are bold, impactful, and evocative. ”Each year, Getty releases an annual trends report on the types of images that most resonate with viewers and leave lasting impressions. Here’s a look at the 2017 list, inspiring examples from brands, plus tips on incorporating these new visual cues into your content marketing. ...
It seems like the platforms that have been around for a while get updates every other week, and new platforms emerge faster than you can count. One trend that binds these new and updated platforms together? Users and the convenience that social offers them. Honestly, people don't want to bounce around from site to site to get what they want, and social media platforms have been making some changes to accommodate them. Because giants like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram have made it easier than ever for businesses to leverage and users to engage with, social is a one-stop shop for audiences. Your audience is constantly online and in social media apps. To find out what that means for your brand, here are four of the biggest changes in social media you need to keep on your radar:...
Just a couple of years ago, it was impractical for most small businesses to create a mobile app. Most didn’t see any real value in it.
A lot has changed since then.
Thanks to app development software tools, many businesses are building apps. And the trend is expected to continue.
According to data collected by Biznessapps, a mobile platform for small businesses, nearly half of small businesses are expected to adopt a mobile app by 2017 or later....
Are you considering creating a new website for your business? Want to know the trends that are expected to take charge in 2017?
The Deep End take a look at the 10 web design trends they expect to see more of in this infographic....
Social media marketing is being similarly watered down. It turns out that likes and follows might not mean as much as we once thought they did. In fact, according to a recent Advertising Age survey, just 11.5 percent of marketers say social media has actually made a positive, quantifiable impact on their brands. In 2017, the most successful marketers will be those who can mute competing messages without consumers even realizing it. This will be a year to experiment with platforms and tactics that reach audiences on their terms—when they’re open to receiving unscheduled messages from brands. Here are four strategies that will help your marketing songs be heard in 2017....
The migration of consumers from stores to online shopping over the crucial Thanksgiving-Black Friday weekend continued dramatically this year, adding to the pressure on brick-and-mortar retailers as they seek to compete with Amazon.com. A survey released by the National Retail Federation on Sunday estimated that 108.5 million Americans shopped online over the long weekend that kicks off the holiday shopping season in earnest, well above the 99.1 million who hit stores. Last year, the numbers were about even for both avenues of shopping.It’s not a surprising finding given that Target tgt and Kohl’s mss , among others, reported record online sales on Thanksgiving. Adobe said online shopping not only eclipsed the $5 billion mark for Thanksgiving and Black Friday, but told Fortune that U.S. online sales from Thursday to Saturday rose 17.3% to $7.23 billion. Many retailers, including Walmart, began their Black Friday deals online right after midnight on Thanksgiving morning....
It’s been a year of milestones for mobile, and it appears that another threshold will be reached this year: mobile devices are close to capturing the majority share of US online ad revenues, according to the latest revenue report [pdf] from the IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Indeed, mobile devices accounted for 47% share of online ad revenues in the first half of this year. That’s a huge jump from 30% share of revenues during the first half of 2015. With mobile advertising growing at a rapid pace – up 89% year-over-year in H1 – it’s not hard to imagine that they’ll claim a majority of online ad revenues by year’s end. Overall, online ad revenues increased by 19.1% year-over-year during H1 to $32.7 billion, though growth was not distributed evenly across formats: - Desktop search spend decreased by 12%; share of total spend declined to 27%; - Mobile search spend more than doubled (a 105% increase)....
Forget trying to design your deck, patio or porch with a drawing. Wayfair LLC is setting up outdoor furniture in another dimension. The home furnishings retailer launched a virtual reality app to let consumers design an outdoor patio area. Wayfair debuted the app, Patio Playground, last week for consumers with the Oculus Rift 3-D gaming headset.In the app consumers can arrange patio furniture in a virtual setting, see how it looks from different angles and in various types of daylight. Wayfair has 85 products for consumers to place in the patio scene, and they can place up to 15 items in the setting at one time, says Mike Festa, head of Wayfair's research and development lab. Consumers wearing an Oculus Rift headset can select a pre-configured patio, such as two chairs and a table with an umbrella, and then switch out the products, or they can build their patio layout from scratch, Festa says. ...
The uptake of new technology is faster than ever before, which means access to your audience is quicker than ever too. All you need to do is target them with a powerful marketing strategy that will engage them in unique ways.
2016 appears to be a great year for all the online businesses out there who are in the race to stay ahead of the curve by adopting these new and effective trends in online marketing, with the goal of making campaigns more effective.
Here are six online marketing trends that your business needs to know in 2016....
At first glance, the weakness in luxury is puzzling because consumer confidence is high and Tiffany's customers still have discretionary income to spend.
But Yarbrough points out that people are increasingly spending on categories other than luxury retail.
"People are still willing to spend on auto, and they're still willing to spend on their homes which are bigger-ticket items," he said.
"They're more interested in cars or homes or experiences," he said, pointing to movies and traveling as examples — not apparel.
An analysis by Jharonne Martis, director of consumer research for Thomson Reuters, confirmed that people were spending their money on hotels and casinos, too, Business Insider's Hayley Peterson reported earlier this month....
When cable TV subscriptions in the U.S. peaked in 2012 — and 97.6 million Americans paid to watch television delivered via cable — it seemed the traditional media supply chain was stronger than ever. Since then, however, cable subscriptions have steadily declined each year.
The usual culprits blamed for this decline are the streaming services, like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and HBO Go. A recent report from MoffettNathanson Research found that 81 percent of adults under 35 have a Netflix subscription. Additionally, millions of Americans are watching television from their smartphones or other handheld smart devices, which makes app-based services convenient choices.
The story goes, “Cord-cutters are canceling their cable services and going over-the-top, therefore it’s the demise of the television business as we know it.”
This premise is wrong. Here’s why: The consumer has their own definition of TV.
To start, we should clarify that consumers now perceive “TV” as content, not as content delivered through a linear hardware box in their living room. HBO, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Buzzfeed — consumers don’t care about where content derives, they only care that it’s quality....
As we approach a new year, we wonder what 2016 holds in store for online marketers.In 1993, web publisher Global Network Navigator sold the first online ad to a law firm in Silicon Valley. Since then, the online marketing trends have evolved year after year, introducing new functionality and fresh strategies to meet the ever-changing demand. As we approach a new year, we wonder what 2016 holds in store for online marketers....
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Exploding Kittens launched via Kickstarter in January 2015 and raised $8.8 million in 30 days. It’s a digital world, but consumers increasingly are seeking out entertainment from a source that’s decidedly analog: board games. In the last year, board game sales in the U.S. grew by 28 percent, per NPD Group, and global sales increased to $9.6 billion in 2016 from $9.3 billion in 2013, according to Euromonitor International. “It plays into the nesting trend,” said Juli Lennett, toy industry analyst at NPD Group. “More people are binge watching and cooking at home, and they’re also playing board games at home, rather than going for an expensive night out. Instead of Snapchat or texting, it gives people an opportunity to come together face to face and have fun.” Along with Star Wars, there are Pokemon, Disney and Jurassic World board games, to name just a few.Riding this wave is Hasbro, owner of the granddaddy of board games, Monopoly, which debuted in 1935. The game’s latest Token Madness contest about which tokens to keep or remove from Monopoly scored 4.3 million votes on social media. Brands got in on the action, too: Zipcar ran a #SaveTheCar social campaign, and the New England Aquarium hosted a #VotePenguin campaign on Facebook Live....
The 2017 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show, which concluded today in Las Vegas, featured boatloads of new technologies, driverless cars full of new technologies. Many of these advances, particularly Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality, have great appeal to marketers. AI, AR, and VR are poised to be transformative technologies for marketers — if not right this minute. For the most part, aside from some tentative and necessary experimentation, marketers remain focused on what can help them immediately. This cross section of 12 quotes from the CES sessions indicates that marketers, for now, will pay more attention to more familiar acronyms, such as CM (content marketing); DDM (data-driven marketing); and CX (customer experience) than to AI, AR, and VR:...
At CES this week, marketers were buzzing about the potential of virtual assistants. “Marketing is much more about providing a great experience or a product that makes a consumer’s life easier and one of the most interesting developments for our business is the virtual assistant,” said Kristin Lemkau, CMO of J.P. Morgan Chase. Most of the attention at was on Alexa, the voice-activated assistant for Amazon’s Echo. Alexa is being described as a potential operating system for the Internet of Things, in competition with Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri. LG announced a smart fridge partnership with Alexa that will let consumers buy groceries via voice. A flurry of Alexa-enabled applications are on the way, with one pundit predicting a launch of 700 new applications in the next week alone....
CES has become the place for companies to showcase new, innovative and promising technology. And with the expo celebrating its 50th anniversary, it's more obvious than ever why the largest consumer electronics show in the world remains a must-attend event for forward-thinking advertisers. A lot has changed since the first CES in New York, which showcased products from just 14 companies. Last year, it played host to nearly 4,000 exhibitors—with over 170,000 attendees getting a first look at new products and ideas. As a svp of sales for CBS Interactive, I've worked with the CNET brand for over 18 years. I've watched more and more marketers make the trip to CES each year to understand how tech can help them better connect with consumers and which tech might help burnish their image as trendsetters....
Trailing mobile among the most influential consumer trends are three others commonly discussed: the emergence of Millennials (see just how many there arehere); 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....
It’s not a surprise Facebook and Google have stayed ahead of everyone else. The two platforms have focused on two key areas: personalizing advertising and those mobile trends we just examined.
Last month, Facebook announced that they have a billion mobile-only users -- not a billion users of the mobile app, but a billion people for whom the entire Facebook experience takes place on mobile. Google has invested its vast resources into mobile search, and in May 2015, more than 18 months ago, it said that “More Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.”
Well then. Here's one for all you culture buffs who pride yourselves on staying abreast of trends as they come and go each year. New York-based sparks & honey is out with its annual A-Z Culture Glossary of 2017: The Trends You Know to be Relevant, a compendium of cultural trends the agency predicts will...wait for it...change the world in 2017! To get one thing out right up front: Trump is nowhere to be found on the list. This is the agency's third outing of the list which, to date, has received over 2.4 million views on Slide Share. Which makes perfect sense because some of the trends and terms used to describe those trends are just whack. To come up with the list, the agency uses a framework called the Elements of Culture to organize its cultural trends. The 100 trends in the report are broken into the following five categories: Aesthetics, Media, Tech/Science, Humanity and Ideology. Among the trends to watch for 2017 are....
The Pokemon Go phenomenon may have peaked, but it sure lit a fuse for marketers to think about augmented reality, location-based marketing, and how their brands might fit in. As with adopting any other technology for marketing, many marketers will treat it as a gimmicky bandwagon. I stumbled across an AdAge article with an interesting insight on why Pokemon Go finally managed to capture the world’s imagination when so many AR and location-based technologies have tried since the first Foursquare checkin 7 years ago:...
There has been an explosion in purpose-driven brand communication the last few years. As Matthew Gardner at Droga5 put it, “Because of the challenge for people’s attention, purpose is the only thing that will get brands to break through. This is not a trend but more of an imperative and should be top of mind for every company. ”When every brand team jumps on the purpose bandwagon, however, the resulting communication can feel pretty shallow. There’s a risk of brands completely overstating why they exist. Particularly when their actual motivation is to capture consumer attention, brand purpose can come across as “ad-deep.” It starts to feel like just one more tick-box on a creative brief....
The Top Thirty Global Media Owners report is a unique ranking of the world’s largest media companies by media revenue, as estimated by Zenith. The report was launched in 2007 and was last published by Zenith in 2015. Zenith defines media revenue as all revenue deriving from businesses that support advertising, to determine which companies are most important for the marketing industry.*
There are four media giants among the top 30 global media owners – Facebook, Baidu, Yahoo and Microsoft – and all have risen up the ranking this year. Facebook has moved up from 10th place last year to 5th place this year; Baidu has moved up from 14th to 9th; Yahoo from 18th to 15th; and Microsoft from 21st to 17th. Facebook is the fastest-growing media owner in our top 30, with media revenues up 65% on last year. Baidu is second-fastest (up by 52%) and Alphabet is third (up by 17%).
Between them, the five digital giants generated US$88bn in media revenue, which is 34% of all the revenues generated by our top 30 companies, and represents 65% of the entire global internet advertising market. Their collective dominance of digital advertising means that these five companies have captured most of the gains from its rapid growth. Digital adspend has grown at an average of 18% a year for the past five years, driven by the spread of mobile technology, the rise of social media and online video, and improved advertising technology, such as programmatic buying and local real-time search. Adspend across all other media has grown by just 0.6% a year....
For two decades now, aspiration has been the watchword of branding. Sell people the story of who they want to be, the logic goes, and the brand wins an unmovable place in their hearts. At one time, many brand campaigns truly struck a chord as they resonated with consumers on an emotional level. We’ve reached a point, though, where many consumers can’t identify the product in an ad, and often can’t place themselves in the idealized aspiration being dramatized. Wrought with overblown promises and fantasy claims, these brands have left consumers apathetic. They live in the real world where you can’t buy happiness, so please, stop trying to sell it them.
Younger consumers, in particular, want to know what you’re actually selling, not how it’s supposed to make them feel. They value what’s real and pride themselves on seeing through marketing claims, so they look for emotional stories that are anchored in a product truth. They’ll trust you when you talk straight, have a sense of proportion, and deliver what you promise PMSEY +%. This down-to-earth approach is a driving factor behind the continued rise of Japanese retailer Uniqlo .
Uniqlo’s offering is simple – low-cost, high quality basics, all delivered with unmatchable customer service. With a focus on fabric over fashion, the brand is able to keep costs low while investing in product innovation. Each product in the store has a diagram of how it was made and an explanation of the materials used to underscore the quality and provide transparency. Advertising is clean and simple, stressing a technically superior garment at a reasonable price rather than pushing an aspirational ideal. All these elements together create a brand that has stripped away all the bells and whistles to offer something real and relevant....
In the Gartner hype cycle, advertising technology is firmly stuck in the “trough of disappointment.”
This is, in many ways, patently unfair. The shift from manual and inefficient ad buying practices to automated and data-driven ones is a no-brainer. There’s little doubt that automation will play an ever-larger role in advertising. Yet ad tech in 2016 is a victim of its own success. Few people fight its ascendency, but nagging questions have arisen based on outsized expectations.
Talk to brands and publishers, and the formulation is basically the same. There are plenty of tech vendors but not enough standards, driving marketer frustration to an all-time high. Consumers don’t trust ads, as evidenced by the rise of ad blocking. Meanwhile, venture capitalists are pouring less money into ad tech.
Too much complexity
The LUMAscape lays bare the sheer amount of fragmentation in ad tech: “There are too many vendors claiming they do too many things for too many people. It’s turned ad tech into a commodity market,” said Brian Ferrario, vp of marketing at programmatic ad company Drawbridge.
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A new survey from Food Network Magazine helps brand marketers decode the path to purchase. Valuable marketing insights!