Three future marketing trends happening now

I spent the past week at the FutureM conference, a community-driven Boston-area event that brought leading marketers and technologists together. Over 100 sessions were held throughout the week. With so much going on, it was hard to take it all in.

Out of all the great information and discussion, there were three future marketing trends that stood out for me. They are:

1. M-Commerce is here and it’s BIG.

M-commerce is the ability to conduct business on your mobile device. As I glanced around the room at each event, almost everyone was glued to their smartphone – yes, most folks had smartphones, with a few blackberries here and there.

At the panel discussion, “Has M-Commerce Finally Arrived?,” Dave Chang, WHERE, Inc., said it best, “don’t try to change consumer behavior, play off existing behavior.”

John Caron, Modiv Media, said that 76% of apps are used less than 10 times. That’s not a model for success, is it?

The big question on everyone’s mind is “What’s the future of M-Commerce?” The panelists all had their opinions on what the future of m-commerce will bring.

John Caron, Modiv Media – m-commerce providers will know your historical transactions and will make recommendations for you based on these. Similar to what Amazon.com does.

Chris Mahl, Level Up – Focus will be on what will make the consumer’s life easier.

Dave Chang, WHERE, Inc. – The line between online and mobile will completely dissolve.

Ron Elwell, Shopximity – the business objective will be front and center.

2. Video games have morphed into Interactive Entertainment for all.

This all started with the gaming industry. The worldwide video game industry is poised to reach $70.1 billion by 2015, thanks to the combined growth of console, portable, PC, and online video games, according to market researcher DFC Intelligence.

It’s not just teenage boys and 20 something males that are fueling this growth. The whole family is now involved. We can see this trend with the popularity of wii and xbox.

3. Think Marketing not marketing.

Mike Troiano, a very successful serial entrepreneur and a principle at Holland-Mark, spoke about successful marketing for start-ups. I would argue his advice can apply to larger companies as well.

According to Mike, the first thing a company needs to do is to “declare its hypothesis.”

To do this, a company needs to determine:

**target – an actionable universe of buyers.
**segment – key predisposing attribute.
**brand – a name you call yourself.
**category – a competitive frame for the buyer
**distinction – what makes you unique
**proof – perceived evidence of truth.

To put into this statement:

For [TARGET] who are [SEGMENT], [BRAND] provides the [CATEGORY] with [DISTINCTION] because of [PROOF].

An example of this might be, “for people around the world, Coca-Cola is the soft drink that is the real thing since 1886.”

Find your one simple thing (OST tm), what SIMPLY describes what your company does, or rather what problems your company can help solve.

What future trends in marketing do you see?

Photo is courtesy of bb_matt’s Flickr Photostream, under Creative Commons licensing.