There’s no question that buying and selling most things has changed dramatically. Before the recession hit us, five interconnected social trends had been developing at their own pace. These trends have been accelerated by market conditions, and they're largely responsible for the marketing tangle we now find ourselves in. Let's see if we can make some sense of them.
People want more information. About everything.
They want to know where their coffee is grown and if the coffee plantation workers have been fairly treated. They want to know if their potatoes are organic. If the environmental policies of their homebuilder are sound. If the emissions of their car they hurt the air. If their clothes were made in sweatshops. Full disclosure has become a mandatory requirement for successful companies.
Consumers expect dialogue.
They want answers when they have questions. If a company isn’t quick to respond to an email or a call to the toll-free line, consumers get annoyed. In our hyper-connected world, consumers themselves respond to emails and text messages all day long, and it is now socially mandated that companies should too. Immediately.
Consumers are searching for authenticity.
We are all looking for what’s real. We want vacations that have small footprints – where we learn about the indigenous people of the places we visit. We want Brie from France, and Burgundy from Burgundy. We have clothes for yoga made from bamboo fibre, and clothes for the office made from Italian wool. We want sushi rice with sushi, and basmati rice with a curry. (When I grew up, there was only one kind of rice. It came in a box. You ate it with or without frozen peas.) Another word for authenticity is truth. People want truth. And plenty of it.
Traditional advertising is working less effectively.
People don’t want to be sold anything. Hype and jive campaigns have soured the consumer towards overtly commercial messages, and rightly so. The proliferation of media options has splintered what audiences are left, and makes it hard to blanket a target demographic with a sales message, regardless of effectiveness.
Social media networking sites have become mainstream.
The disintegration of our shared sense of community is largely blamed on technology. We keep hearing that no one knows his or her neighbours anymore because we all spend too much time online. Ironically, it’s technology – in the guise of social media like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. – that is re-energizing the concepts of connection and community, making them relevant again.
Social Media is not a fad. It is a radical change in the way we collect and process information. It’s risky to post statistics because these numbers are changing so rapidly. But, at the time of writing, the following numbers give you a snapshot of how powerful and popular social media has become.
• By 2010 Generation Y will outnumber Baby boomers.
• 96% of them have joined a social network.
• Social media has eclipsed porn as the number one activity on the web.
• If Facebook were a country it would be the 4th largest in the world.
• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55 to 65 year old females
• Generation Y and Z consider email passé; In 2009 Boston college stopped giving incoming freshmen email addresses.
• YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, with 100M videos.
• There are more than 200M blogs, and more than half post content or tweet daily.
• 14% of people trust ads. 78% say they trust social media peers.
• 25% of Americans watched a short video last month. On their phone.
• 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation.
• We no longer search for the news. The news finds us. Soon, products will find us too.
• More than 1.5 million pieces of content are shared on Facebook, daily.
Combined, these five trends create a perfect storm of change; an environment where everything we knew about the sales and marketing of just about everything needs to be rethought. In many ways this makes our life more exciting, as marketers. I look forward to getting up every day and finding out what new thing I don’t know about. Keeps us all on our toes.
