Episode Description:
This episode is all about the future! What will the next five to ten years bring us in the marketing world? How will we connect with customers? Where will we connect with customers? How will we exchange value for goods and services? I even attempt a mid-atlantic accent to seal the deal!
Action you can take right now:
- You’ve already defined a target market many times (right?) – use it to think about WHERE and HOW you might need to connect with your customers in the new year!
Episode After-Thoughts
I love seeing trends and seeing how they playout. Some things flare up quickly and fizzle out just as fast, while other things seemingly come out of nowhere.
Marketing is no different. Trends come and go but some basics have lasted generations. Some trends develop into changing the world (digital marketing for example). It’s important to think about WHERE you can connect with your customers.
Episode 38 Transcript:
Transcript
What does the future of marketing look like in 2022 that and more coming up on the marketing and service.com podcast?
Justin Varuzzo here from the marketing and service.com podcast. The podcast designed to help you grow your business by creating incredible customer relationships.
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And it helps keep me motivated also what’s going on in your business?
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Hit me up on the marketing and service.com at Facebook page and I will build an episode just for you in today’s episode. I want to jump into the future of marketing.
As we close 2021, I’ve been thinking. A lot about what will marketing look like next year. Marketing is something that evolves so quickly and changes year after year.
Trends come and go different patterns start to emerge and the expectations of consumers shift so I find myself thinking?
What is the future?
How will connections be made between businesses and consumers?
Where will those connections be made?
How will transactions occur?
What types of ships can, we expect.
Of course I am trying to just look into a crystal ball and I may be way, far off or maybe I will be pretty accurate.
I don’t think we’ll really know the answer to that question for about another 5 years.
But I want to jump right into it and cover the top things that I see as trends that are already starting to occur that might not yet.
Be identified as a trend and if I’m wrong, then these things might fade away and if I’m right.
It may actually be the future of marketing.
So the first and foremost is marketers, looking to shift consumers to monthly revenue and subscription models.
We’ve had some guests on the show and I’ve talked about this a lot.
Obviously this is a trend that’s been happening for a long time.
If you want to check out the Barack Kennedy episode.
We talk a lot.
About subscription models and how that can actually 10 X the value of your business by having this recurring revenue on a monthly basis.
In fact, in that episode we dig into the?
Fact that your business will be worth far more even if the overall revenue and sales is less as long as you have that recurring monthly revenue.
It’s so important, and we know that strong cash flow is King.
It really is more important than profit or revenue.
These days as crazy as that sounds especially.
For investors or bankers or anyone in the finance industry who might be thinking about helping you grow or expand your business.
The first thing they want to know.
Is how is your cash flow because that is so critical in the success of your business long term another change?
I see is a consolidation of delivery methods and what I mean by this is really the delivery of the message right so newspapers and magazines were the delivery method for print.
Ads right radio was the delivery method for audio ads TV has long been the delivery channel for motion picture.
Ads but we’ve seen these things slowly starting to get replaced right so newspapers and magazines have been replaced with blogs and websites.
Radio has been replaced with well podcasts.
Of course, and TV as a delivery channel has slowly been being replaced with You Tube for example, digital video.
Nowadays, social media is the delivery method for so many digital ads outside of Google and You Tube.
It really is.
The primary delivery of oral digital ads.
So I think we’re going to see more and more of these traditional delivery methods start to get consolidated into digital delivery methods and one of the ways I see that.
Happening is
The car of the future with huge screens.
APIs and software development opportunities.
The car of the future is going to bring us the most exciting marketing opportunities.
I apologize for the worst Mid-Atlantic Accent ever.
But if you don’t know what that is, look it up.
It’s interesting, and it’s why so many people spoke like that.
Well, not like that, but you get the idea.
Back in the 20s, thirties and 40s in the infancy of radio.
But yes, the car I do believe is the future.
Cars already have huge screens.
The screens are getting bigger and bigger and of course.
It’s dominated by Tesla right now, but Apple we keep hearing the rumors of a car coming soon.
So of course, when two tech companies have the two best selling cars on the.
Planet, it may actually leave Google and YouTube in the dust when it comes to that delivery method of ads, right?
So if you’re not driving your car because it’s autonomous and now you have a giant screen, where is the opportunity to deliver messaging to that screen?
I don’t know if Apple will do that.
I don’t know if Tesla at this time is going to ruin the driver experience by making.
Ads, but what if it was ad supported?
What if you get a discount on your monthly car payment by allowing ads inside the car?
And it’s not ridiculous to think because Tesla already utilizes the in screen car to upsell opportunities like their self-driving software.
You can actually do this through the car.
They can offer specials on those.
Programs through the car.
So advertising and marketing through the car is not something I’ve just made up.
That’s totally unique.
This is something that may be coming to more and more cars.
Unfortunately I think it will be to the dismay of many drivers in different brands, but I think the best brands will make sure that the.
Experience is exactly what you want it to be, so let’s jump over to the shopping experience and how the shopping experience relates to marketing.
I think the future is retail.
I know that sounds crazy because for the last 10 years all I’ve heard is retail is dead.
Retail is dead.
But I also know.
Everything that is old is new again, and there’s an entire generation of people.
Children, especially that don’t even know what life is like without wearing a mask.
That is so accustomed now to online delivery services and things coming directly to the door, I believe that they will get to an age where they yearn to go back and live the life that their parents lived.
And that’s going to mean they will want to go to stores and see and purchase physical goods and services in person.
I mean, who hasn’t watched?
The last season of Stranger Things and feel.
So a little bit of that nostalgia for going to the mall.
I mean, it was so much fun back in the day to go to the mall and for some reason that luster has just been lost because the mall just isn’t that fun anymore.
But I can see it becoming the place that people go and hang out.
Once again.
A great example of this showing that trend is GameStop.
If you haven’t been following, GameStop had some wild stock activity in the past 12 months and a big chunk of that was individual young.
New investors taking small amounts of money. 5 dollars, $10 or $100 and investing it in GameStop because they believe in the model.
And they believe that the best way to go and purchase video games and consoles and accessories is in person.
They like to go to the store.
They like to buy it and they like to get home with it right away.
Now there’s a lot more involved with the game.
Stop hysteria other than that, but that does make up a chunk of those small investments that have put hedge funds out of business.
And Speaking of even ten years ago, will go a little bit far.
There when swing dancing started to make a huge comeback, this was in the early 90s mid 90s and that was a thing that we hadn’t seen for a very long time.
And it made a huge comeback.
Now that comeback didn’t last very long, I feel like that was about five years and then it started to fade away.
But I do think retail is making a comeback.
I think we see it with the retailers.
We’ve been able to refine their model and refine their business.
And make it more efficient.
They are all doing very well.
You look at the likes of a Kohl’s target, Best Buy, they’re all doing better than expected in a very bad retail environment, and I think that that will eventually start to trickle down to all retailers, and we’re going to start to see a lot of success in the retail industry.
I just think that the experience
In that industry is going to be different in five years than it was five years ago.
And if you don’t make that change, you probably won’t be there in five years to see it happen.
And remember those bell bottom jeans?
I don’t.
I was born well after that, but I was born in the skinny Jean era and of course now I’m being told that.
This is something that is not cool anymore for the young people to wear skinny jeans, but I can guarantee one thing in the next 20 to 30 years.
Skinny jeans will be the cool thing again and I’ll be there and have mine ready to go to continue down that shopping experience.
I think there’s no check out in the future.
We talk so much in marketing about.
Reducing friction making the easiest checkout process possible.
What types of things Apple Pay all of these things to reduce the steps needed to purge?
Or something things to make it more convenient for the customer to purchase something, but I think at the end of the day, the model that’s going to win is no check out at all.
Checking out sucks anywhere just for about anything.
There’s very few times that I get through a checkout process and say, well, that was the easiest thing in the world.
Generally all checking out, especially in retail.
Really sucks, Amazon toyed with this idea when they acquired Whole Foods that they could create the Amazon go store where you wouldn’t have to checkout.
You simply add whatever you want to your cart and you walk out and it will automatically figure out what you purchased and Bill you accordingly.
My guess is that’s not quite as easy as it sounds because.
Despite many years now of Amazon owning Whole Foods.
I’m just not seeing that take off anywhere.
In fact, some of the efforts to try to create a more efficient checkout have been horrendous.
One is BJ’s Wholesale club.
I recently just had the opportunity to use their self checkout feature.
Now a lot of stores have a self checkout but I’m talking actually checking out, paying and walking.
Out of the store without ever going through a register.
That is the concept that BJ’s had, but at.
The end they.
Make that greeter check every item in your cart they have to scan up to all 20 items which you are limited to those 20 items at this time, but they have to scan all of them and the headache of watching them struggle with their little scanner and figure out how this system works makes it miserable and you realize it would have just been.
Quicker to go to the checkout and you wouldn’t have the embarrassment of 20 people standing behind you, angry that they’re not getting out faster.
So keep that in the back of your mind.
No checkout is the future of retail, it’s the future of all shopping.
The ultimate goal is that if I want something, I can just get it and I don’t really have to check out somehow.
You’ll just automatically bill me or automatically take my money, and maybe this links back to the subscription model that I mentioned right in the beginning.
If you have a great subscription model.
Or maybe people can just come in and take whatever they want and bring it back whenever they want and then take more stuff whenever they want.
But you’re just going to charge them every single month.
I don’t know what that looks like.
I know Blockbuster tried to do that with movies and it didn’t work out well for them.
But I do think there is some opportunity there.
Another thing I see in the future of marketing.
And again I’m talking 5 maybe even 10 years out of return to reusables.
And what I mean is a return to built for life products.
We live in this culture where we put so much stock into corporate social responsibility.
We put so much stock and take it so seriously when companies try to make.
Environmental initiatives when they talk about reducing their carbon footprint when they talk about reducing waste when they talk about recycling precious materials.
But what no one talks about is, why not just make stuff that doesn’t suck and we know that the truth is it’s more profitable to make things that break that you can replace over and over and over again.
But the bottom line, let’s take a look at something like appliances.
We all know that any appliance that we buy today is never going to be remotely like appliances that were sold in the 50s.
That are probably still in some houses functioning just fine 50 years later.
I think it’s safe to say that none of us expect to get 50 years out of an appliance, and quite honestly, the way my trend has been, I don’t expect to get 10 years out of an appliance, so we could use better materials.
We could use thicker metal.
We could use better insulation.
All of these things would make for a more expensive product, but one that would last for a very long time.
I do think that there is a secret.
Learning in the marketplace that nobody is really fulfilling.
There’s a few exceptions.
There’s some companies that really make some great quality stuff that haven’t sacrificed their quality over the years, but they’re few and far between.
By shifting to reusable items and items that are built for life, you’re going to eliminate waste.
It’s great for the environment.
There’s less waste.
There’s less things being thrown away, but where it stands now, letting corporations really set the trends for environmental consciousness to me, seems like letting the cigarette companies run the healthy lung initiatives.
It just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
This is a pipe dream.
Of mine, I don’t think this is probably going to happen in the next 5 to 10 years, but in my head I have a pipe dream that one day we will have amazing items that are sold for a lifetime that are serviced for a lifetime.
That parts are available for year after year, after year after year.
That would be a dream come true.
One thing that I think.
Is going to be essential in marketing moving forward and this I see happening right now and I think it’s going to happen more and more and really trickle down to small and medium sized businesses over the next five years.
That’s cooperative collaboration.
Mutual advertising I kind of touched on this on one of my earlier podcasts about how it’s a great idea to reach out to competitors.
Find out what you do better and what they might do better.
And don’t be afraid to send customers to them and think about other businesses in your area or in your space or in your vertical that you could partner with.
That maybe you could have some type of synergy together in a marketing effort and just to prove my point with this I looked at some marketing news today and here are headlines that I’m pulling directly from marketing news and these were all in the same day, so these are consecutive stories.
But listen to these headlines.
White Castle joins only fans for spicy Thanksgiving content.
Coca Cola and Walmart opened stores on Snapchat.
Walmart to host Twitter live stream.
Spiderman is stranded in Hyundai’s new ad.
Nike CTS athletes on a new Roblox platform.
Do you see where I’m going here?
Do you catch the trend on all those headlines?
Every single one is 1 company with another company.
Now that might be one corporation and a delivery mechanism like White Castle and Onlyfans.
But the bottom line is these are.
All cross brand.
Efforts, and I think that for us as small businesses, we have to really start to think about where is our opportunities lie for these cross branding efforts because that will be the key to compete with the bigger companies in the next five years because that is happening right now.
I mean, I didn’t make those headlines up.
That’s one.
Day and every single headline had two company names in the headline title.
That’s really something to think about.
How can you build cooperative agreements with other businesses or organizations?
Maybe you can partner with charities.
Maybe you partner with other local businesses if you’re a small local business that does it.
And has a local territory.
If you’re an online business, are there other businesses that you can partner with or that you can Co brand items with or that you can cross endorse anything like that?
You know, that’s something that happens a lot in podcasts these days are cross podcasting, podcast swaps.
Whatever you want to call it, where I agree to be on someone podcast.
They agree to be on my podcast and it works out great because usually if you do this properly you might have two related but separate audiences.
So think about that in.
The context of your business.
If you have two separate but related audiences with another business that might be down the road from you and see if there’s any of that Co branding opportunity, because I can tell you right now, you just heard those headlines.
The big corporations, they are all Co.
Branding everything.
So think about how you can Co brand.
Moving forward, the next thing I think is going to be the future of marketing and maybe just the future in June.
VR and AR.
Now this one I’m on the fence about because I’ve been promised these incredible virtual reality experiences since I was a little kid.
So for 40 years I’ve heard and seen and been promised that there was going to be some cool VR stuff right around the corner.
Of course, come today VR.
It’s there.
Better than it.
Was 30 years ago.
But really not anything that was promised back in the day and it’s still not that great and it still doesn’t have wide consumer adoption.
One thing that we’re seeing a lot of a shift on in terminology is going from VR2R.
Now, of course, if you don’t know VR virtual reality, right? You put on the goggles. You’re in a 3D space. You feel like you’re in another world.
And maybe you can have some experiences that you couldn’t have in real life.
I could take a rocket to the moon and I could do it in VR from the safety of my couch.
So there’s a lot of cool opportunities here, but you really have to build it into a platform that could either be educational or useful in a way that is not just sitting around and essentially watching TV with goggles on.
Someone who’s taken that approach very seriously as Apple, Apple has really set the trend and pushed AR, which is augmented reality.
Now the difference between VR and.
Is that our is not complete virtual reality?
What error does is take certain elements of VR and apply it to the real world.
So a great application of our would be if you are on an assembly line, for example, and you’re manufacturing a product and you’re wearing glasses and you’re looking at the real product.
In front of you and you’re putting screws together, but you could have an overlay that would say what tool you need next.
You might have the procedures for the process to assemble this.
It might suggest where the tool is.
Maybe you can bring up a picture of what the tool looks like to make sure you’re using the proper tool so all these things that kind of overlay.
Like reality, right?
That’s why it’s augmented reality.
You’re taking reality and you’re augmenting it to make it better.
To make it more efficient, to make you better to make you more efficient.
Some early examples that I’ve seen of AR working really well right now, and I’ve done a podcast on Warby Parker in the past where I purchased my glasses.
From they’re a great little company.
I have no affiliation with them, but I just enjoy what they’re doing.
They have an app where you can try on all of their glasses with what they call a virtual try on talked about this, but I’ll run through it again quickly.
The way the app works, it actually uses the laser face scanner that’s in the iPhone only, and it uses that to actually measure things like the distance between your pupils and the width of your nose and the bridge, and then when you put the glasses on, they are virtually overlaying the glasses, kind of like a Snapchat filter, but it actually.
Is exactly what it’s like in real life and that’s what surprised me.
Is overlaying something over your head that’s fake?
That’s not really that new.
The problem with it like we’ve seen in the clothing market and a lot of things that have been released five years ago or in the past five years, is that it rarely is very accurate.
You might put a couch in your living room virtually, but then when you actually get the couch, it’s a completely different size.
The scale is all wrong.
Nothing makes sense, but with this using that laser LIDAR technology I should say light our technology by using that it can actually sense the depth and it can really take a measurement of the 3D space of your face and head and it allows them to really accurately show what those glasses are going.
Look like that is a perfect use of AR, another company I just read about.
I don’t have any personal experience with this is called Perfect Corp.
They just came out with beard tools. This is like men’s grooming goods and they use a very similar system where you can see what your beard or mustache might be like based on how you shave it or what. Shaving tools you use.
And it’s supposedly incredibly accurate as to what that would look like in real life.
Now the flip side of this whole airplay that Apple has been pushing is of course Facebook.
And it’s no surprise that Facebook would want to do exactly the opposite of whatever Apple is doing.
But with Facebook, you’ve been hearing a lot about the metaverse.
The Facebook metaverse right, they even changed their name to Meta a few weeks ago in this metaverse that is straight up virtual reality.
But Facebook might just be the company that has the power and the money and the deep pockets to succeed in creating.
A virtual.
World that is successful listen is 2021 comes to a close. It’s always a time that people begin to reflect on the things that they’ve done over the course of the year.
And they start to look to the future and think about the things that are ahead of them.
And in this podcast.
This is kind of a fun one. At the end of the year here where as we close out 2021, these are my impressions.
Of where I think marketing will go moving forward.
And just to kind of summarize, again, it’s all about how connections will be made right?
Because we’re already seeing a lot of these traditional mechanisms of advertising and marketing are becoming more complicated, with privacy regulations, and that’s just going to get worse and worse.
Things like spam emails and spam texts and Facebook tracking you all over the world.
All these things are going to start to become more and more.
Difficult as people realize how much their privacy actually is invaded by these organizations.
So we really have to think to ourselves how will those connections be made?
How will we connect as a business to our customer?
Then of course, where?
Where will those connections be made?
Will Facebook will it be LinkedIn?
Will it be in the Metaverse or will it be in the car?
Think about that.
Where will those connections be made and are you going to be ready for it when it happens?
And of course, how?
Will transactions occur?
How will money move from one place to another?
Will we even use money in the next five years?
Will everything be NFC?
Will it be Bitcoin?
Will it be digital currencies that maybe don’t even exist yet?
I don’t know, but it’s something to think about the way a transaction occurs is definitely going to change in the next five years.
Mtes have gotten a ton of attention and I’m not going to go into what they are or how they work, but let’s just say it can replace a lot of services when it comes to contracts and it comes to executing contracts.
Escrow and a lot of really practical applications for an F.
T beyond the glitz and glamour that you hear about it right now in terms of tracking intellectual property in a sense which even I’m not 100% on.
What is going on there?
And I got to touch up on that and that is my new year resolution.
I’m going to learn a lot more about non fungible tokens because NFC.
I know are going to be a significant part of the future.
And why not learn more about it now? Why wait and maybe in 2022 when I actually have a?
Handle on it.
I’ll do a show on FS if we can link that to marketing somehow, which I’m going to bet we can listen.
Thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. On next week’s episode, and I usually don’t tease the next weeks episode. On the previous week, but on next week.
Episode I’m also going to do the same type of show I did today, except I’m going to talk about the future of.
Service, because of course this is the marketing and service.com podcast. I can’t talk about the future of marketing without talking about the future of service.
So definitely, if you enjoyed this episode, check out next week’s episode on The Future of service and if you enjoyed this episode like Follow Subscribe, Shoot Me an email.
Com That’s JUSTN at marketing and serve.
Dot com you can always go to the website for show notes.
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