Warc, Deloitte reveal trends for marketers in 2013

The Toolkit is a guide to the biggest challenges marketers face and is based on Warc’s database and Deloitte’s marketing and insight practice. The first of the big challenges is from hard-pressed consumers looking for value for money. They are also seeking authenticity and transparency.

Citing The Futures Company’s ‘Global Monitor Survey 2012’, the Toolkit report said that a growing number of consumers globally are becoming ‘enraged’ by companies, with one in four consumers falling into this category. Also, 71 per cent of consumers said they felt companies had taken advantage of them. This number was 63 per cent in 2010.

Therefore, the challenge for brands in 2013 is to respond to angry consumers whose living standards are shrinking, according to the report. One example of this is NAB Bank in Australia with its ‘Break Up’ campaign, which, played on the perception of the big banks as a ‘cartel’. NTUC Income in Singapore also revamped its brand by going back to the company’s cooperative roots.

The report recommends that brands offer consumers value for money and act as their champions, much like Canadian beer brand James Ready, which, saw its sales grow by finding ways to help consumers save money.

The second big challenge is the impact of technology on the ‘path to purchase’. In particular, consumers are checking information and prices on their phones. The report says the challenge for advertisers is to understand how technology can change the the path to purchase and at what points consumers can be influenced. Mobile is playing a big role as a source of information. An example of this is ‘showrooming’, where consumers browse products in real-life, then use their phones to search for information and compare prices.

In short, this trend implies that marketers should closely align in-store messages with mobile, while ensuring TV is linked closely with social media, search and e-commerce. Mobile’s influence is particularly strong in categories like travel, electronics, clothing, and financial services. Mobile has been slower in the food and drink space. Retail chain Walmart is keen to get ahead of this trend by appearing in mobile searches and enhancing its mobile applications to provide shopping lists, in-store navigation, and relevant content to a shopper’s local store. Warc expects Asia to make further developments on the mobile front in 2013.

Thirdly, the Toolkit suggests fresh thinking on social media and its effectiveness. Studies indicate that brands should be looking at reach rather than engagement or loyalty metrics across social media.

The onus is now on social-media owners to show how they can benefit brands and to turn their access to consumer data into a money-making marketing tool. Brands in turn need to understand how to best use these platforms.

The report cited work by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, which looked at the impact of fan engagement strategies and argued that brands should be studying exposure to messages among light buyers of the brand. The report argued that Facebook fanbases are skewed toward heavy buyers, who are a small proportion of actual buyers. They challenge is to target less regular buyers or non-buyers to increase sales.

Facebook is now using its EdgeRank algorithm to remove non-relevant posts from users’ newsfeeds. As such, research from GroupM points out that reach  has gone down while engagement has increased. The Toolkit report said that FMCG company Procter & Gamble balances paid and earned social marketing. For example, it developed content around detergent brand Tide based on a breaking news story and then used Facebook’s paid ad service to maximise reach.

Conversely, new research shows that offline word-of-mouth remains an integral part of marketing. The report says brands may find it easier to target individuals who are heavy users of the brand. Making them advocates is likely to have more social value. In India, Philips used ‘superpromoters’ and studied the reasons for their enthusiasm and the way they promoted the brand. 

How brands can use their expanding 'Big Data' databases is the final challenge for marketers. The report recommends marketers first identify a small number of data sources that directly influence a brand’s perfor­mance, then find ways to analyse and visualise patterns within that data. One big opportunity of digital data is to track what consumers actually do, as opposed to what they say they do. For instance, marketers should look at how consumers search for information in their category and how they are influenced.

Ad spend

The report also predicted ad spend in 2013. It expects advertising spends across the 12 major markets tracked by its ad forecast, including the US, India, China, Japan, UK, Germany, Brazil, France, Canada, Australia, Russia and Italy to increase during the year. Ad spend will go up 12.5 per cent and nine per cent in China and India, respectively, compared with last year. Ad spend in Australia will increase 2.6 per cent, while Japan will see 1 per cent growth. BRIC countries continue to be the strongest performers.

2013 will be the first year the internet accounts for more ad spend across these markets than magazines and newspapers combined. Despite growing, TV is losing share in all markets except India, where TV growth is faster than overall market growth.