Blog #13: The Future of Marketing

                  People are constantly thinking about the future and what it will look like. We love to speculate about new kinds of technologies, such as cars, cell phones, and other advancements that will affect our daily lives. People love to dream about the future and all of the magic that it holds, but we often only think of the whimsical aspect of life. We don’t dwell on details such as what wars we will be fighting or who will be the president at the time. In fact, when we think about the future, we don’t usually focus on details at all.

                  One detail about the future that I, for one, have never thought about is how the practice of marketing will have evolved and what it will have become. I recently took the time to watch a video on the American Marketing Association’s website about the future of marketing. This video focused primarily on what marketing will look like in the year 2024, so ten years from right now.

After clicking on this video and waiting for it to load, I took some time to think about what I thought marketing would look like in ten years. Some initial thoughts that came to mind for me were that marketing would become more dependent on new advancements in technology, and more focused on customer feedback. Due to the fact that marketing is so specific to each company, it was hard for me to put my finger on exactly what I thought marketing was going to look like in ten years.

The video that I watched on the AMA website interviewed three men in the business world about their opinion on the topic. The first was a man named Jonathan Becher, who is the CMO of the German software company SAP. Becher thought that “a brand will look like a publisher and a publisher will look like a brand”. Becher went on to elaborate what he meant by this, saying that brands will have to be entertainment content, or basically self-sufficient when it comes to marketing themselves.

The next man interviewed, Rohit Bhargava, is a professor of Global Marketing at Georgetown University. Ten years from now, Bhargava thinks that crowdsourcing reviews will be seamless and easy, so that marketers can offer reviewers incentives. He sees the marketing world turning towards a bartering system, with the value coming from social profiles.

The final man interviewed, Pete Blackshaw, is the Global Head of Digital and Social Media at Nestle. Blackshaw see that marketing will become more transparent in the future. He believes that there will be more customer control, and that marketers will work harder to meet “unmet and unarticulated needs”. Blackshaw thinks that there will be new forms of data analysis led by customers, and that this will lead to marketing precision.

After watching this video, my original thoughts on the future of marketing seem pretty accurate. Most of the men interviewed believe that the consumer will have a greater opinion in the marketing process. I think that seeking out more customer opinions and using advice will be very important to the success of the company.  I’m very excited at the prospect of working in this future marketing world!

To watch the video, click here.