2015 is over, now we are at 2016, I guess most of us will ask ourselves this question: “My year 2015 resolution failed, why my new year’s resolutions always fail?”, by recalling what you did in the past one year, you might be able to give a perfect answer to this question. Now let’s start to ask ourselves a different question: “How many things did I get in the past one year that I wasn’t expecting?”, you might be surprised that number of unexpected things is a lot more than what you wished to happen, right? How many out of these things were you able to predict? I guess very few…
Coming back to the topic, “A prediction (Latin præ-, “before,” and dicere, “to say”), or forecast, is a statement about an uncertain event. It is often, but not always, based upon experience or knowledge.” There are tons of articles on the predictions/trends of digital marketing and eCommerce technologies out there based upon experts’ experience and knowledge. But today, I want to do something different, but still according to the definition of ‘prediction’.
1. Digital marketing platform?
Mobile will dominate desktop, this is not a prediction, it already happened, no matter if it is traditional media or digital media, the customers need to use their eyes and ears to receive the marketing information, is there a new way to grab customers attention and present your marketing information? Probably we already have this device, the Virtual Reality headsets, isn’t it? So, the marketing professionals, grab this opportunity and quit developing your 360 marketing strategy, now send your customer a VR set and SINK them.
2. How to produce content?
In marketing, content is always the king, besides generating great contents, brands need people to talk about their content (I always found the term ‘world of mouth’ very funny, probably because I’m Chinese, a picture of all the mouths grew on the top of the earth like mushrooms always appear in my head…), now what to predict about the content marketing? Maybe there are new devices like a mask and a pair of gloves, send these to your bloggers and customers, when they wear the masks and gloves, whenever they want to talk or type, the words and contents come out from them will follow your brand guidelines and everything coming out will benefits your brand, sounds funny?
No, we already have it – the Artificially Intelligence, it’s about how you are going to use it
3. Data driven or Technology driven?
In my mind, the term ‘data driven’ always remind me the data is riding on top of the marketers with a whip, and the marketers could only find their direction following the whip. Now the BIG data is coming into our life, I guess after BIG data, there will be GIANT data, after GIANT data, there will be HUGE data, but are we on the right track? Data analysis in marketing activity versus the user behaviour, to me it is always a question of chicken and egg, markets try to ‘predict’ and ‘plan’ user’s next action, on the other hand, users have to accept what’s available to them, they don’t know what the web page will or should be looked like after they click on the button…
I’m not saying data analysis is bad, there is just cases that big companies lost their spirit and soul when the sales data shows the consumer like the other fruit brand’s design more. so my prediction is that in the near future, every family will own a robot, the robot will be the one to read and filter all the spams, and the robot can be programmed by the owner to decide what data can be collected by the marketers, so the robots do all the data analysis which brand fits the owner, so if the brands wants to know more about the user, they better be able to hack into these robots…
4. Conversion or Conversation?
When a customer bought a product, the marketer says it’s because they set up a great campaign and marketing strategy to convert the leads to a buyer, can digital marketers really be able to manipulate a customer’s buying behaviour? I don’t think so, can digital marketer create conversation channel with the buyers? Yes, definitely, but every buyer is different, so are their buying triggers. So my prediction is the VR headsets, the AI and robots mentioned in #1 and #2, #3 will be combined into one system.
Before the customer goes to bed every night, customer put on their VR site and chat with the AI what a day they have been through, and suggest what the customer could do the next day to change to a better mood, the products and brands suggestion will be passed to the family robot and robot will perform the online buying and bookings for the owner, so what the owner should do when he woke up? just enjoy the day that is well designed for him/her.
So what I want to say is no matter you are an advertiser or a publisher or a consumer in the whole digital marketing eco system, the technologies will dominate and reshape our future work and life, but shall we be dominated? shall we be controlled by millions of bytes of data presented to our eyes and ears every day and lost ourselves in it? that probably could be one of the questions we really need to think about…
