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5 Rising Model Tendencies For 2020

5 new brand trends for 2020

As we enter the last year of the decade, we want you to understand what brands are all about. Not by making predictions, but by analyzing the recent history and development of brands and realizing that the cyclical behavior of people is at the center of the next steps. People are still the reason for a brand's success. How you treat them, how you make them successful, how they trust you in a world full of data and data protection problems. All of this is very important. Indeed, what we see in our preliminary forecasts is more human-oriented in a world full of technological solutions. Here's what you should think about now as we enter 2020.

1. The majority of online reviews are not real: In the past, many brands quickly noticed how they got a head start by using online reviews to push their way up. But lately it is not surprising that the "wisdom of the crowd" and their reviews of your product make little sense when most of these reviews can no longer be trusted. With deep distrust of reviews, potential customers withdrew into a smaller circle of influence that included their closest friends, family members and allies. For this reason, brands should take care not to emphasize their digital footprint too much, but take the trouble to earn the five stars. We'll see that authentic five-star brands win this decade.

2. Brands thrive in the physical world: The past decade has been full of terrible advice. Brand marketing is not important, advertising is dead, retail is dead. The last of these three statements is really so far away that it surprises many how brands like Away Packet, Travelocity and Netflix are now in the physical space, even though they are digital brands These! We know that brands cannot scale if they are not in human living ecosystems. And so it is more important than ever where you play in the physical space, because the physical space enables real discovery and interaction, unlike the crowded digital world, where you can only be discovered through many paid ads, engagements and interactions that Say nothing The entire human story about what your brand is, how it thinks, feels, smells, tastes and looks. This can only be achieved physically and analogously, which is why it is not dead, but is simply remixed for the world where everything is two degrees away from a status update on social media.

3. Brand marketing is more important than ever: In the past ten years, many brands have been above-average performance-oriented. I mean, if you tried everything to measure and show ROI, then of course long-tail activities like brand marketing were thrown in the trash. But in 2019, brand marketing struck back. First, some big brands admitted that performance marketing ruined their brands, and second, good evidence was released that found overemphasis on performance to be junk science. The best of brand marketing still brings performance marketing into the mix. In fact, Les Binet and Peter Fields found that the top performing brands spent around 60 percent of their budget on brand marketing and 40 percent on performance. A hybrid, to say the least. It is important to mention that some major brands that have stalled in the past few years tend to have a 10 percent to 90 percent performance mix. You cannot win new customers if these new customers do not know you and they do not know you if you only send highly targeted, personalized messages. Brands are important when people can talk about them with others, and social confirmation takes place when many people have seen the brand. This only happens if brands actually commit to brand marketing.

4. Brands open shop windows without Amazon: How is that possible? Well, these digital advertising giants are just midfielders who want to use your money to connect people with you. But nobody says that you have to follow these rules. What if you launched a brand with outdoor advertising today? Do you think I'm crazy? DTC brands do this every day. And they use both the brand and the performance to track the effectiveness of out-of-home marketing. Many may say that this is insane and that they can only scale through the use of these large digital monopolies, but such thinking goes wrong. Brands are not developed by digital media, but digitized by people who have learned about the brand in different ways and have taken measures to discover the brand using platforms such as search or social networks. But what about selling goods? How can a brand do this without Amazon? Hmmm, maybe we should ask this cult brand. More importantly, in a world where digital technology is so big, it's overcrowded, but monopolized by three players, we're going back to Trend 2 on our list, where your brand physically helps a lot. The physical experience is now marketing. In this way, brands that have paid a lot of money digitally over the past decade can use that budget for customer experience, service, and success when it matters most in a world where intimate word of mouth is more important than that fake diatribia in trend # 1. And do you remember a few years ago when people and brands had to behave like publishers? Publishers have the most control when they can go straight to their audience. This also applies to brands. Brands have to be their own shop fronts because if you own the shop you can be more personal. The best way to do this is through first-party data, not from Amazon or other walled gardens.

5. People pay more for brands with a human side: The powerful algorithm. We will never see them die, but in a digital world where many understand how they work and where they find nothing interesting, they could mean less. If you're like me, you can complain that going to Blockbuster earlier was a terrible experience because after three hours you still had no idea what to see. The algorithm was the people who worked in the store. Dreadful? Not if you think we've replaced these people on many platforms like Netflix, Hulu, or Disney +. In Spotify's music, Apple and Amazon have taken similar measures. For example, the search tells us what we want to know, but it can't help if we don't know what we want yet. Curation and human sensitivity have a new status in the age of algorithms. Yes, the more we have, the more we need automation. But we also want increasingly informed and idiosyncratic selections. The world still needs human curators and concierges to guide us. That is why brands are important. They are these curators and concierges. In a world where automation has overtaken what we see, hear, feel and smell, it is important to get up to date with human sherpas. We enjoy the chaotic reality of someone else's taste and a trustworthy personal connection. We don't just want correlations – we want a why, a story that machines can't offer. Even if we define curation as selecting and arranging, this is not just up to the algorithms. Unlike so many industries that experience technological disruptions, from self-driving cars to automated accounting, the cultural field will always appreciate human decision and unique perspective. For this reason, Human Choice brands will have the greatest added value in the coming year.

If we look back on our list and add trends 1 to 4, we will reach 5 as a natural consequence of what we can expect in 2020. All of this makes sense. People need brands that they know more than ever have human intentions in a world flooded with lack of trust, digital counterfeiting, automated spam, monopolies and gamified hype.

Contribution to Branding Strategy Insider by: Geoffrey Colon, Head of Brand Studio, Microsoft, author of Disruptive Marketing and Moderator of Disruptive FM, sponsored by Branding Strategy Insider.

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