As every Tom, Dick and Harish puts out his trend sheet for 2025, I thought I might as well do it. Here is a list of marketing trends I see in the year ahead and in the years that will roll out thereafter. Do take it with a pinch of salt, if not a shovel of it.
The second currency is the first currency now
All of us as consumers carry two currencies that take us through life. The first has typically been money and the second, time. The second currency now overtakes money. While money can be topped up in our lives in myriad ways, we are yet to discover how to top up time. Consumers in 2025 will be that much more demanding when it comes to how their time is used by marketers. This has ramifications for media, entertainment, distribution systems, retail, ecommerce, quick commerce, customer-service and a whole host of arenas.
Gone are the days when patient marketers expected their consumers to be patient as well. Marketers need to brush up their act on how they create time-saving products, services and systems for their consumers. Charge a fee for it if need be, but save time. Remember, we as consumers are not living. We are dying. One day at a time. How I die must be my choice, dear marketer, not yours.
The consumer becomes weak, not strong
As marketers of yore kept saying the consumer is king, a whole consumer-centric movement fell into place. Customer-journeys, customer-personas and tools of every kind kept being put together by marketers. These tools are there with us, but their use will lessen in the years ahead. The marketer is becoming that much more powerful today.
Few consumers will hear this from the marketer. Marketers will at first be sly, and then shy to admit this fact. The point remains though that the marketer is getting more and more powerful. Data analysis and enhanced data-reading tools are helping it all. Data is not the “new oil” anymore. Instead, it is the “new alcohol”. It reaches those parts of the marketing organisation the marketer never knew existed even. AI tools of every kind enhance the marketer’s power.
In many ways, the ownership of personal data is now shared between consumers and marketer. The marketer incidentally has more enhanced tools today to understand every consumer sentiment, mood, tone, tenor, decibel and decision-making journey. I do believe 2025 will see the early signs of quantum computing falling into place. When this happens, expect marketer ability to manage customers (existing and potential) rise by a minimum enhanced factor of 22.
Imagine understanding your customer 22 times better than the marketer does today. The thought is exciting, and scary. It is fraught with the positive and negative equally.
AI tools will help us analyse consumers , design marketing campaigns, design personalisation in everything and create content that is relevant, original and innovative. Expect a new lingo ahead. I will call it “moment-of-weakness marketing”.
The marketer will know your every strength and weakness. She will design campaigns to cater to your moment of weakness. And in your weak moment, you will buy what the marketer’s power will get you to. The onus of your decision-making shifts to the marketer. We therefore need responsible marketers or responsible consumer-protection angels who will raise the voice when it needs to be raised.
Everything goes virtual
As the burdens of being in the real world increase, virtual society and its products and services will offer solutions that are craved for. This will include love, companionship, sex, travel, food, friendships, clubbing, and lots more. All simulated, of course. You will be able to take a cruise to the Bahamas on Virgin voyages, just as you might have the same cruise line offer you a virtual voyage in your drawing room. A bit like the virtual arrest trending in ‘jugaad’-India.
You can possibly pay, participate, pause, and resume the voyage out at your pace. Product and service discovery will happen for all categories in the virtual world. The real and physical world will be less important for the consumer.
The responsible brand emerges
As marketers get the image of being more and more irresponsible with the use of data and technology to their advantage, the responsible brand will emerge. More often than not, this will be spurred on by activist organisations and practitioners of the retro and holistic ways of living.
I categorise nations into four segments. Right at the bottom is what I call the “submerged nation”. Challenged nations whom we used to dub underdeveloped in the past. Just above that is the “developing nation”. India is one. And then comes the “developed nation”. The US for one.
And right at the peak of the pyramid are what I dub the “supra-developed nations”. Countries like Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands are top here. In 2025, expect the responsible branding movement to be spearheaded by two types of countries: The supra-developed and submerged nations.
There will be two pressures on marketers from both ends of the pyramid. These two will occupy the pole position in protecting the future of consumers. The developing and developed nations of the world will live in the now as the other two will dictate, demand and script the long-term future for the earth ahead.
Marketing-affected people
As marketers go berserk with data, enhanced consumer knowledge, personalisation and more, a whole generation of folk in the submerged and supra-developed category of markets and nations will host a large mass of people who I call the “marketing-affected people”. These are people who suffer silently in the beginning, and hopefully will get more and more vocal as the years go by. They are the ones who lost jobs, livelihoods and the wherewithal to work itself. The small retail kirana grocer is one such. There are hundreds of others.
I have listed out a total of 41 marketing trends for 2025. I have space for just these five for now. Cheers to 2025 ahead, then! It bears things good, bad, ugly and equally very ugly.
(Views are personal)
Harish Bijoor
Brand Guru & Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults