5 VISUAL MARKETING PREDICTIONS FOR BRANDS

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It is simple human nature to make predictions. Perhaps it’s due to a discomfort with uncertainty, or a fascination with prophecy. Either way, making predictions is a relatively easy exercise, while being right about them is far more challenging. For brands facing an increasingly competitive marketplace, being right more often than not is an imperative for success. Fortunately, as marketing technology and analytics have become more sophisticated and pervasive, we have gained the ability to monitor trends in consumer behavior more effectively, making predictions less of a guessing game. Additionally, with the proliferation of visual user-generated, or “earned” content, brands are able to track consumer preferences and product usage like never before. At Olapic, in order to continually innovate for our clients and partners, we spend much of our time studying audiences and brands to identify the most impactful trends.

INTRODUCTION

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Today, marketing is even more visual than ever before, meaning that brand optics have taken on an unprecedented importance. We’ve prepared a set of five predictions that we believe will drive the near-term future for visual marketing:

As you read on, consider how you might implement these ideas into your brand’s evolving marketing strategies.

1 Consumer-led marketing will

reach full-maturity, as brands react to consumers putting their trust in one another.

3 Personalization will be a mandate for

brands hoping to remain relevant and capture audience loyalty.

5 Brands will consolidate their

tech stacks, and both virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) will fail to live up to their hype…for now.

2 Brands will develop proactive

methods to engage visual content creators, moving away from purely transactional relationships.

4 Brands will prioritize “quality”

over “quantity” in their visual content creation efforts, and place greater emphasis on distribution and measurement.

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1 Consumer-led marketing will reach full-maturity, as brands

react to consumers putting their trust in one another.

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The first prediction is a bit of a warm-up, because it’s one we’ve been accurately making for quite a while now. This year, however, consumer-led marketing will take a giant leap forward, as the industry experiences a critical intersection between consumer preferences, technological capabilities, and brand adoption.

Why We Are Confident:

“Authenticity” in marketing has been a prevailing trend, with consumers rallying against heavily edited imagery in advertisements representing unrealistic or unrepresentative individuals. As a result, consumers now look to one another for product inspiration throughout the buying cycle. Recently, Olapic commissioned a survey of over six thousand individuals in six countries, entitled, “Consumer Trust: Usage & Attitudes Towards User-Generated Visual Content.” In it, we learned that respondents trusted images posted by other consumers on social networks seven times as much as they trusted advertising.

What does this mean? Well, earned content is more affordable and efficient for brands, and is heavily preferred by at least the consumers that we surveyed. This intersection should lead to an expansion of earned content usage for brands in the new year. Of course, there is still a valuable place for brand-owned creative, and we typically advise our clients to continue their investment in it as part of a broader content strategy. But we expect that brands will more often lead with consumer-generated creative, and develop brand-owned imagery that aligns accordingly.

Additionally, micro-influencers will continue to gain power over traditional celebrities. A common misconception is that celebrities and macro-influencers have the greatest impact on revenue simply due to their high follower-counts. For our clients, we have found that oftentimes, creators with very few followers and lower engagement rates actually can convert consumers at a much higher frequency.

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2 Brands will develop proactive methods to engage visual

content creators, moving away from purely transactional relationships.

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Our second prediction follows closely from the first. Traditionally, the brand-consumer relationship has been largely transactional. The brand provides a product and the consumer pays for it. Simple. In today’s economy, consumers expect more from their relationships with brands. They prefer to buy from brands that align with their personalities, social and world views, and unique eccentricities. As an example, according to a recent Nielsen global online study, almost three-out-of-four Millennial respondents are willing to pay more for sustainable products.1 Price aside, this shifting reality has led to a new type of working relationship. In the next year, we believe that consumers will be willing to take partial ownership of brand experiences, and will put effort and resources into positioning a brand, provided that a tangible benefit is provided in return. In this new normal, there will be a democratization of content creators, where micro-influencers that demonstrate creative talent are employed by brands, and the population of brand-focused creatives will grow far more expansive.

Why We Are Confident:

This has already taken place in the form of earned content contests, where brands offer tiered prizes to the top content submissions by consumers. Perhaps most famously, Doritos, over a ten-year timeframe, held an annual commercial-production contest where the winner was used as the brand’s Super Bowl commercial.2

For brands, this may represent a change in course from existing loyalty programs, which are still predicated on reactionary, transactional encounters. Smart brands will recognize their high-value content creators and proactively engage them with offers, or giveaways, or experiences, to demonstrate their importance not just to sales, but in leading the brands into the future.

1“The Sustainability Imperative.” Nielsen. 10.12.15.2“Doritos Is Ending Its 'Crash the Super Bowl' Contest, but Not Before One Last Hurrah.” AdWeek. 9.15.15.

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3 Personalization will be a mandate for brands hoping

to remain relevant and capture audience loyalty.

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Through the use of intelligent analytics, consistent customer messaging, and more sophisticated social technology, brands have a real opportunity to create more personalized experiences for all customer tiers. In 2017, personalization will no longer represent an opportunity for customer delight, but will become a mandate for brands hoping to remain competitive. According to research from Accenture, 75% of consumers are more likely to buy from a retailer that recognizes them by name, recommends options based on past purchases, or knows their purchase history.3 When consumer relationship management was still a nascent idea, audiences may have been creeped out that a brand would know who they are and what they care about. Today, however, they expect brands to have an understanding of their lifestyles, and don’t have time for brands that treat them like everyone else.

Why Are We Confident:

As technology has enabled more targeted experiences, consumers have gradually opened up to allow brands to become a bigger part of their lives. Whether it’s because consumers really want to accelerate personalization, or they have simply accepted that absolute privacy in modern society is unlikely, they expect that brands have tons of data about their habits. So it follows that the brands should use that data for some tangible benefit to consumers.

Still, creating truly personalized experiences that treat customers as individuals and not as segments is a complex process. Many brands have turned to earned content to help generate more impactful experiences by letting consumers dictate how they are portrayed alongside various products. Using earned content to enable personalized experiences also has two secondary benefits:

Scale: With over 500 million active users on Instagram alone, creating more than 95 million photos per day, brands have unlocked a wealth of potential content that would be impractical or impossible to create on their own.

Efficiency: The cost to generate enough high-quality content to fulfill a growing set of relevant channels would be prohibitive to even large, successful consumer brands. By intelligently unleashing the potential of consumers to create, brands can gather content quickly and at a much lower price point.

3“Personalization Pulse Check.” Accenture. 2016.

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4 Brands will prioritize “quality” over “quantity” in their visual

content creation efforts, and place greater emphasis on distribution and measurement.

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Every day, it seems that more channels emerge representing new potential touchpoints with customers. While we continue to speak about the “content crunch,” or the gap between how much content is needed for brands to succeed and how much they actually have, brands are faced with the emerging challenge of how to effectively distribute high-quality content in order to achieve desired results. In the next year, pressure from other disciplines, and growth of the “pay-to-play” business model will lead marketers to further invest resources on distribution over creation.

Why We Are Confident:

As “content” has matured, brands have rightfully focused on developing production processes to fulfill the need for creation. With ephemeral networks like Snapchat and Instagram Stories gaining in prominence, some brands have even set up newsroom-like production teams to service the need for constant creation. So, to be clear, we are not saying that the need for high-quality creative is going away, simply that implementing an intelligent distribution plan is equally, if not more, important.

Distribution is ultimately the most direct line to profit, and it’s time that brands treat it as such. Those that do place emphasis on intelligently distributing and tracking content already wildly outperform those that do not. In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute, 88% of “top content performers” measure the ROI of their programs, compared to just 56% of bottom performers.4

The good news is that there is enormous opportunity for brands here as well, especially those that activate their customers’ content. Earned content can be a tremendous help in guiding distribution activities by:

Encouraging community engagement, including interaction with content, digital conversion, and additional content creation

Providing a consistent narrative across otherwise disparate channels

Surfacing the highest-performing content, and showcasing which individual content assets are driving real revenue versus everything else

Activating new audiences to distribute on the brand’s behalf: including prospective customers, employees, and micro-influencers

4“2017 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: North America.” CMI. 9.28.16.

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5 Brands will consolidate their tech stacks, and both virtual

reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) will fail to live up to their hype…for now.

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For marketers, there is never a shortage of “shiny objects” to get excited about. From automation tools, to retargeting strategies, to digital analytics platforms, brands have rapidly onboarded enough technology to make any marketer’s head spin. Of course, there is an undeniably positive impact to becoming more technologically-savvy and data-driven. Modern marketing has a much more credible seat at the table than ever before. Conversely, the pendulum has swung just a tad too far for many brands, which quite often integrate technology to keep pace with competition rather than to optimize an organizational vision.

In 2017, we expect the pendulum to swing back toward the center, as brands consolidate their tech stacks, and focus their efforts on areas of critical importance to the organization. At Olapic, we tell our clients to evaluate technology through the lens of business value. Which channels do you invest the most in, and which provide the greatest portion of your revenue? If a technology partner only focuses on the least critical aspects of your business, it probably isn’t worth your time, energy, and money. This year, platforms that survive this consolidation will be ones that drive and track revenue directly, or ones that result in cost efficiencies.

Why We Are Confident:

With the buzz surrounding emerging content formats such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), the latter of which perpetuated by the explosive popularity of Pokémon Go, brands are already hard at work on developing ways to integrate them into their active programs. While these technologies may well represent the future of brand engagement, and have potential applications for training and entertainment, we don’t expect them to reach their potential in the next year. In our estimation, the scalability and quality of these experiences is still inordinately prohibitive, and like all transformational technology, the population is lagging in full adoption. This doesn’t mean that brands shouldn’t be working on how to integrate these content experiences into their programs, we just don’t believe they will have the immediate impact many marketers are banking on. As the creation and consumption technology catches up, the potential for consumers to create these types of experiences on

their own will rapidly improve the broader adoption and potential for brands.

For other applications, this could be a critical year of advancement. Brands are using artificial intelligence, for example, to combine the best elements of both in-store and digital buying experiences. In one instance, The North Face partnered with IBM’s Watson to use artificial intelligence to mimic the helpful in-store associate in an online experience. In another, NYX Cosmetics used earned content screens in its Union Square, New York City flagship store to replicate the audience personalization traditionally reserved for digital encounters. These efforts work because they are innately and immediately aligned with revenue for each respective brand, and because they are focused on providing more meaningful experiences for customers.

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These are just a few of the predictions we have for the near-term future of visual marketing. Underlying all growth in the sector is the need for brands to become more proactive, in their messaging, technological development, and customer engagement. There also remains an enormous opportunity for brands to curate, activate, and analyze their customers’ content, which can serve as a consistent thread across all touchpoints. It will be interesting to see how the consumer-brand relationship continues to evolve. Wishing you and your team lots of success in 2017 and beyond!

CONTACT:

sales@olapic.com +1 888 399 6685 Olapic.com © 2016 Olapic Inc. All rights reserved