Crystal ball gazing 2010

Recession, economic slowdown and employee downsizing are passé. We are entering the 10th year in the new millennium; marketers need to understand and appreciate consumer’s needs and aspiration in a changed environment.
Understanding consumer articulations of category needs and expectations identify future trends with uncanny accuracy.
Let me open a dialog with visionaries, marketers, academia, friends, professionals and peers on the trends that decide the future success and failure of branding and marketing efforts. The trends indicated are from my learning’s and experiences. If you have a different view point please add on or contest enabling us to put together a road map.
Reason to buy
Excessive spending, even on sale items, will continue to be replaced by a reason-to-buy at all. This is trouble for brands with no authentic meaning, whether high-end or low.
“Value” is the buzz word
What makes goods and services valuable will increasingly be what’s wrapped up in the brand and what it stands for? Why Hero Honda instead of Yamaha?
Brand value determines Brand differentiation
The unique meaning of a brand will increase in importance as generic features continue to plague the brand landscape. Awareness as a meaningful market force has long been obsolete, experience and demonstration is current consumers demand and differentiation will be critical for success—meaning sales and profitability.
Brand should become part consumer’s lingo
Brand values can be established as a brand identity, but they must believably exist in the mind of the consumer. A brand can’t just say it stands for something and make it so. The consumer will decide, making it more important than ever for a brand to have measures of authenticity that will aid in brand differentiation and consumer engagement.
Consumer is hungry
Brands are barely keeping up with consumer expectations. Every day consumers adopt and devour the latest technologies and innovations, and only hunger for more. Smarter marketers will identify and capitalize on unmet expectations. Those brands that understand where the strongest expectations exist will be the brands that survive – and prosper.
Old wine in new bottle
In case your brand didn’t get the memo here it is: consumers are on to brands trying to play their emotions for profit. In the wake of the financial debacle of this past year, people are more aware then ever of the hollowness of bank ads that claim “we’re all in this together” when those same banks have rescinded their credit and turned their retirement plan into case studies. Celebrity values and brand values need to be in concert, like Aamir Khan and Teach India. That’s authenticity.
They won’t need to know you, to love you
As the buying space become even more online-driven and international (and uncontrolled by brands and corporations), front-end awareness will become less important. A brand with the right credibility and strong value offering can go viral in days, with awareness following, not leading, the conversation. After all, everybody knows Fiat, but nobody’s buying the cars.
Consumer retention is customer care
Conversation and community is all: ebay thrives based on consumer feedback. If consumers trust the community, they will extend trust to the brand. Not just word of mouth, but the right word of mouth within the community. This means the coming of a new era of customer care.
Thanks to community forums on the internet
Consumers are talking to each other before talking to the brand.Social Networking and exchange of information outside of the brand space will increase. Look for more websites using Facebook Connect to share information with the friends from those sites. More companies will become members of Linkedin. Twitter users will spend more money on the Internet than those who don’t tweet. Mouthshut, Bigadda is extending consumer interface.
Experience, Education, Engagement and Excitement is the order of the day
It’s the way today’s consumers do business.Marketers will come to accept that there are four engagement methods including Platform (TV, offline, online), Context (Program, webpage), Message (Ad or Communication), and Experience (Store/Event). But there is only one objective for the future: Brand Engagement. Marketers will continue to realize that attaining real brand engagement is impossible using out-dated attitudinal models.
Accommodating these trends will require a paradigm change on the parts of some companies. But whether a brand does something about it or not, the future is where it’s going to spend the rest of its life.How long that life is up to the brand, determined by how it responds to today’s reality.