Preicting the future -thoughts from the marketing community

cimI am blogging from Moor Hall, HQ of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. I am here with some leading educators in the field of marketing and I have asked them to make a prediction for the year 2020 and their impact on marketing.

These are some of their predictions:

More intermediaries in the supply chain. Increased levels of fraud on the internet lead to higher levels of distrust so people start to turn to trusted intermediaries. Trust is built on a one-to-one basis, meaning marketers will need better interpersonal and relationship skills.

Less intermediaries in supply chains – increased global competition means that organizations are forced to adopt leaner business models. Business decisions get made on far more ‘rational’ constructs (price, delivery time etc)…leads to the conmmoditisation of products and services. Markerters have to add value and ‘personality’ to end consumer?

More robotics – less need for people working…use of realistic robots in customer services…for example in call centres. This already exists “Ask Anna” on line in IKEA. Impact for marketing is how ethical is this? Should people know when they are talking to human and when it is a robot?

More intelligent workspace – office won’t need computers as we will have touch screen walls and desks etc. Is this an additional advertising channel- like ‘pop ups’ on the internet.

Less nationally-bounded democratic systems. With population movements and lifestyle changes (such as people buying holiday homes) the traditional residency requirement for access to democratic systems becomes increasingly obsolete. This will have ramifications for political marketing and for company’s PR/lobbying activities.

Segmentation by DNA – understanding customers more effectively by DNA profiling – this has huge ethical implications. Surely this would conflict with a marketer’s professional standards of conduct?

Virtual learning – there will no longer be a need for students or delegates to travel to classes or conferences. Everything will be done remotely. All marketers will need to be au fait with digital marketing strategies to market virtual events to an increasingly international audience.

Apologies to all those that made predictions that haven’t made it to my blog. If you are passionate about any of the issues you have raised then can I suggest you start your own!

2 thoughts on “Preicting the future -thoughts from the marketing community

  1. Segmentation by DNA is rather scary. The first point, about trust, is interesting though – the relationship between trust and marketing is fraught at best. We trusted the banks, and look where that landed us.

    I’d suggest trust has a lot to do with doing what you say you’ll do. And if you do that, do you need marketing people to help you?

    1. Yes – marketing hasn’t always been very trustworthy. If it is about giving people what they want, then it certainly hasn’t always been doing that. However, in its defence, within marketing there is a stream of research on ‘anti-consumption’ http://www.icar.auckland.ac.nz/ which looks at why poeple don’t consume (which is what everyone will need to do more of if we have a hope of surviving on this planet in the future) and marketing techniques can also be used effectively in social campaigns (such as persuading them to not drop litter, for example http://www.encams.org/home/newsdetail.asp?nw=294).

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