So what does 2010 hold in store for marketing and media, especially as we should be beginning to move out of the recession and as we gear up for the 2010 FIFA World Cup? Here are 10 predictions for 2010.
Getting closer to the consumer: brand managers will look towards marketing strategies that involve closer contact with the consumer. In-store marketing that gained impetus in 2009 will continue to grow apace as marketers choose face-to-face strategies over faceless shotgun approaches.
Social media: with the cost of Internet access and cellphone usage coming down, however slowly, consumers will resort more and more to sharing their purchase experiences with their personal networks and a growing number of consumer complaint websites. Retailers of goods and services will have to monitor these to avoid being caught up in an e-tsunami of consumer backlash, as has happened in the US and UK.
Measurement: with the cost of marketing, particularly mass media advertising, having sky-rocketed during the past few years, more and more marketers will be under pressure to prove campaign results. The days of trusting instinct are long gone. Boards of directors will want to see results and not promises.
The big idea: the recession will have effectively killed the notion of relying purely on a "big idea" for marketing success. 2010 will be the start of a move toward pragmatic marketing, featuring built-in measurement tools and the use of logic, technology and common sense. Put it this way, for marketing to work efficiently in future, it will have to be conducted in a way that accountants can quite easily understand.
Online advertising will continue to grow: the only media type to have actually grown during the recession, online advertising will continue to make inroads into the advertising and marketing budget pies. Already in the UK, last September, online advertising passed TV to take top spot. But, the growth in online advertising will also mean a paradigm shift in the way advertising is constructed. Online will start demanding a completely different approach to that of conventional media.
Online media: newspapers will wake up to the fact that taking advantage of online is not just a question of reproducing their print products online. That was a massive mistake in the past and effectively just ended up with newspaper giving content away for free to the detriment of their print products. Newspapers will start to reassess their online presence or simply go bust.
Media convergence: if we do get faster Internet and much wider bandwidth, South Africa could see media convergence beginning to take effect by the end of 2010. Which will mean massive mindset changes among media companies whose newsrooms will be filled with content providers to a variety of media rather than print, radio or TV journalists.
The 30-second commercial: South Africa will remain one of the world's last bastions of faith in the 30-second TV commercial. However, given the demand on marketing to become more measureable, more and more big brands can be expected to move away from the very expensive and largely un-measureable mass media shotgun approach to something much more focused. Perhaps 2010 will be the year that branded TV really takes off as a far more effective, efficient and cheaper option to the 30-sec commercial. Don't hold your breath, though. There are still far too many unskilled brand managers around who continue to be convinced that the 30-sec commercial still works.
Customer service: it can generally be expected that 2010, being hopefully the first post-recession year, will be one in which marketers and senior corporate executives start taking consumers seriously. Maybe this will be the year when South African companies realise that saying "WE CARE" to consumers means absolutely nothing to them.
2010 and the FIFA World Cup will provide a lesson to companies and their marketers that it is better to offer good value at a good price rather than a once off rip-off.
Chris Moerdyk was head of strategic planning and public affairs for BMW South Africa and spent 16 years in the creative and client service departments of ad agencies, ending up as resident director of Lindsay Smithers-FCB in KwaZulu-Natal. Chris was recently listed in a Markinor survey as one of South Africa's top 10 marketing thought leaders. Apart from currently being a corporate marketing analyst, advisor and media commentator, he is non-executive chairman of Bizcommunity. Email Chris on and follow him on Twitter at @chrismoerdyk.
I hope lesson #10 is learnt sooner rather than later, when the damage is done. Sydney suffered three lean tourist years after the Olympics and the reason was greed. And government is one of the worst culprits with SAA and ACSA leading the way. Posted on 11 Jan 2010 15:26
This may interest some of you as it embodies a lot of these points...
On 7th January 2010, Verifone (the world’s largest operator of payment solutions) announced on the NYSE that they had granted a licence to iMobilise Transportation Systems to deploy its metered-cab payment and media solutions in South Africa in time for the World Cup in June. For the first time in South Africa, passengers will be able to pay for metered cabs using their credit or debit cards.
iMobilise have already signed on 1,500 cabs in the Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban areas and will start installing these systems in March 2010.
These systems come with a 5.7” passenger screen that can display 15sec adverts in full colour and sound. Passengers can turn down the sound but cannot turn off or navigate away from the ad.
GO! Brands are the exclusive sales agents for these 15sec slots. Check out www.gobrands.co.za for more information. Posted on 11 Jan 2010 21:14
Well done Chris you've hit it. This is a very interesting article as it gives us all that is expected in 2010. I strongly agree with you that in order to save costs these 30 seconds commercials are a no no. Online marketing is the way to go. Posted on 12 Jan 2010 08:59
I agree Chris! I do sometimes wonder though whether the majority of brand managers and/or their agents actually want the increased measurability provided by digital media...Certainly makes it harder to hide from the more commercially minded decision makers and top management in organisations. Brands who do not embrace interactive media are however on a slippery slope and will lose eventually (even if it takes years). In SA as in most developing markets the only real mass market digital / interactive medium is MOBILE and I am surprised that you did not make more of that fact in this piece. Rick Joubert, www.rickjoubert.com Posted on 12 Jan 2010 11:30
LEGAL DISCLAIMER: This Message Board accepts no liability of legal consequences that arise from the Message Boards (e.g. libel, slander, or other such crimes). All posted messages are the sole property of their respective authors. The maintainer does retain the right to remove any message posts for whatever reasons. People that post messages to this forum are not to libel/slander nor in any other way depict a company, entity, individual(s), or service in a false light; should they do so, the legal consequences are theirs alone. Bizcommunity.com will disclose authors' IP addresses to authorities if compelled to do so by a court of law.
Angola
Botswana
Malawi
Mozambique
Namibia
Zimbabwe
Cote D'Ivoire
Ghana
Nigeria
Kenya
Uganda
Tanzania
Mauritius
Seychelles
Algeria
Egypt
Morocco
Zambia
