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Trends to Watch in Marketing and Branding in 2012

With 2012 less than a week away, there is no better time than right now to look at what’s ahead in the world of marketing and branding for the new year. JWT Intelligence released two reports that shed insight into the year ahead: 100 Things to Watch in 2012 and 10 Trends for 2012.

Some of the key trends that JWT Intelligence predicts will be hot for the new year include the following:

  1. Price Opportunities: Brands will introduce low-cost entry-point products into markets for price-sensitive consumers with “stripped down offerings” and smaller sizes.
  2. Shared Value: Companies will shift from simply donating money to charitable causes to integrating social causes into brand strategies.
  3. Interactivity: With a growing trend toward making screens interactive, brands will focus on finding new ways to engage consumers through touch screens and experiences.
  4. Redefining Age: “Old age” is changing with the term focusing on an older audience than ever and a more active older audience. Brands will find ways to better communicate with and target the aging audience.
  5. Tangible Add-ons: As more content and products become digital, brands will look for ways to add a tangible, tactile experience to those digital products and services and vice versa.

These trends aren’t ground-breaking or innovative. They’re reactions to how the world is changing and examples of how brands need to adapt to macro- and micro-environmental changes. Brands that don’t adapt will fall behind quickly. However, these trends provide excellent strategic opportunities to leverage the changing world and consumer audience for positive brand growth.

The trick for brands in 2012 and beyond will be keeping up with the changing world and consumer audience. In other words, change always happens, but today, change happens faster than ever. Therefore, brands and businesses must be flexible enough to stay ahead of those changes in order to lead (or at least compete) in the markets where they operate.

Is your brand positioned to navigate through fast-changing consumers and markets in the short-term and beyond? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Apple Surpasses Walmart in Online Shoppers

Walmart might be one of the biggest retailers in the world, but Apple is the company with the most online shoppers as of November 2011 according to comScore (as reported by Ad Age).

There is one thing that’s pushing Apple ahead of Walmart — iTunes. Of the 79 million unique visitors to the Apple website from the United States in November, 30% of them came for the iTunes digital content store.

Digital content sales are exploding everywhere, and it’s a trend that’s going to continue to grow. Consumers are purchasing more digital content, including music, television shows, movies, and books than ever. With the skyrocketing sales of the iPad and similar tablet devices, more and more consumers are shifting their media consumption habits to digital content every day.

comScore reports that ecommerce sales are up by approximately 15% over a year ago, but digital content sales are up twice as much. In fact, Ad Age reports that December 25th has been dubbed “Download Day” because so many people are looking for content for the devices they received as Christmas gifts that day. Between December 25th through January 1st is the period each year when the most most digital downloads occur.

The rise of Apple’s iTunes traffic and download sales shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. What’s surprising is that so few competitors are making headway against Apple and the iTunes store. It will be interesting to look at these statistics again next year at this time to see how Apple and competitors are doing in the download market.

Another interesting point to consider is the overall trend toward digital content consumption and how that shift will affect download sales throughout the year. There’s no going back now. Digital is here to stay. Can another company compete with Apple in the short-term? Now is the time for someone to make a move.

What do you think? Who can give Apple a run for the money? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: Flickr

U.S. Senate Calls for Thorough Google Antitrust Investigation

In June, word got out that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) planned to ramp up its investigation into Google’s position as the biggest and most powerful search engine. On Monday, the leaders of the Senate antitrust subcommittee delivered the results of their ongoing investigation to the FTC, and the results don’t look great for Google.

Of course, common sense tells you that it’s highly unlikely Google can deliver unbiased search results when its entire business strategy in recent years has been to try to make people Google-dependent by surrounding them with integrated products. The launch of the +1 button and Google+ don’t help Google’s case at all.

The subcommittee said as much in its letter to the FTC:

“Google has a strong incentive to bias its search results in favor of its own offerings. Rather than act as an honest broker of unbiased search results, Google’s search results appear to favor the company’s own web products and services.”

You can read the full letter to the FTC here.

Google’s response was exactly what you’d expect. The company spokesperson glossed over the importance of the investigation by saying people have a choice in the search engine they use and Google is “committed to competing fairly on the Internet’s level playing field.”

This story is far from over, and it’s a very important one. The results of the investigation could be widespread in the United States and around the world. Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that the European Commission is expected to release a 400-page document detailing its own antitrust allegations against Google in early 2012.

The problem that the U.S. Senate subcommittee and the FTC have with Google is not its dominance in Web search. The problem is in Google’s possible use of its position as market leader to drive people who use its search tool to its own products and services rather than providing unbiased results that put all websites and competitors through the same ranking criteria and on a level competitive playing field. Doing so without clearly disclosing it would be a violation of antitrust laws. Antitrust laws are intended to protect the free market by prohibiting anti-competitive behaviors and business practices for the benefit of consumers.

What do you think about these investigations against Google? Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment and share your thoughts about the company and brand that has become a household word for Internet search and allegations of antitrust law violations.

Image: Flickr

Mobile Media Report Sheds Light on the Future of Mobile Commerce

In a new report released by Nielsen, State of the Media: The Mobile Media Report, the future of mobile commerce is beginning to get clearer to marketers. The report gathered data from a wide variety of Nielsen’s sources related to U.S. consumer audiences, including surveys, device metering from iOS and Android smartphones, cell phone bills, and volunteer panelists.

According to Nielsen’s findings from the study, approximately 2 out of 3 Americans between the ages of 25-34 own smartphones (63%), and approximately 1 out of 2 between the ages of 18-24 own smartphones (53%). In fact, the number of Americans who are smartphone subscribers and use the Internet via their mobile devices grew by 45% since 2010.

For marketers, data around the usage and downloading of mobile apps is very important, and Nielsen’s study shows that 62% of smartphone users in the United States have downloaded apps on their devices with games being the most popular type of app used within 30 days. However, 87% of people who downloaded an app in the past 30 days have used deal-of-the-day sites such as Groupon and Living Social. That’s another area of great interest to marketers.

Texting is still a popular mobile marketing tactic, so it makes sense that marketers want to hear about texting trends. According to the Nielsen study, teens between the ages of 13-17 are the heaviest users of text messaging (sending and receiving an average of nearly 3,500 text messages per month).

One more big piece of the mobile marketing puzzle is video, which is growing incredibly quickly thanks to smartphone and tablet penetration. During the third quarter of 2010, 16 million Americans had a mobile video smartphone that they used to watch video content (10% penetration). One year later during the third quarter of 2011, that number had increased to 26 million (14% penetration), and showed no sign of slowing down.

Bottom-line, mobile marketing is the future, and the future has officially arrived. If you don’t have a mobile marketing strategy in place for your brand for 2012, you need to make some changes to your marketing plan to at least begin testing mobile marketing tactics in the new year.

What do you think of the future of mobile marketing? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: Flickr

Google+ vs. Facebook: Which Brand Will Win in 2012 and Beyond?

In 2011, the battle between Google and Facebook really picked up. Google+ just might be the tool that Google needs to compete with Facebook and its 800 million users. Or is it?

Before we go any further, remember that Google+ is new, and there is certainly much more to come for the social network owned by the biggest and most powerful search engine in the world.

Google’s goal is to integrate all of its products so consumers have no need to use products from any other company to complete their online activities. Therefore, it’s safe to assume that Google+ is the next step in Google’s larger strategic paln, and the site will likely become a central focus from which all Google applications and products can be used. Google wants to use personal data and online behavior to connect consumers more deeply to the entire suite of Google products making people Google-dependent.

And of course, there’s all that social data that can be extracted from Google+ user behaviors. Those social signals will undoubtedly play a part in Google search results in the future as Google’s +1 button already seems to be doing in some search engine optimization tests. For brands and businesses, the new Direct Connect search tool for Google+ brand pages is just one more way that the Google social networking site is playing a roll in search results.

On the other hand, Facebook’s goal to date has been extremely focused. The site’s mission to create the world’s open social graph with features and tools that make it easy for people to connect with friends and acquaintances, has expanded to include new opportunities. However, the core goal has remained the same.

Of course, monetization has become a priority, and with the speculated 2012 IPO, it can be presumed that Facebook will change a bit in the coming years in order to continually deliver increased shareholder value. Facebook’s goal will undoubtedly evolve, but it’s unlikely that the core focus of using personal data and activities to open advertising opportunities will shift significantly in the future.

What do you think 2012 holds for the Google+ vs. Facebook battle? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: Flickr

Twitter Positions as the Friendly Brand with Latest Redesign

Time for a new #newtwitter. Last week, Twitter unveiled another “new Twitter” with a goal to make the site simpler and less intimidating to casual users and advertisers. The new design positions Twitter as a friendly brand and is expected to connect the widespread awareness of Twitter to greater engagement on the site.

This new version of Twitter divides the site into four areas when you log into your account:

  • Home: Includes tweets from everyone you follow on Twitter.
  • Connect: Interact with other users and search for users.
  • Discover: Search for tweets using hashtags and see personalized news recommendations.
  • Me: View your own Twitter profile.

To regular Twitter users, these new sections aren’t really groundbreaking. The information has always been easily accessible, but Twitter’s leaders believe the new design makes these sections even easier to find with fewer clicks.

Of course, it’s assumed that many of these changes are also intended to boost advertising opportunities and interest. On the same note, Twitter has launched brand pages, which are available to a few brands right now, but are expected to roll out to everyone in the future. Twitter won’t charge for brand pages. Instead, the monetization focus will stay on its advertising offerings.

And that leads us to the most significant change that debuted with this most recent Twitter redesign. Now, images and other media that are included within a tweet open directly within each individual tweet (on the side of a user’s screen) rather than in a separate web browser tab or window. This is great news for users and huge news for advertisers. Suddenly, the 140-character limit is gone, because advertisers can include media, such as videos and images, with their promoted tweets. There is no doubt that many advertisers will be very interested in this new feature.

What do you think of the latest Twitter redesign? Is Twitter delivering on its attempt to be the friendly brand? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.