Decoding Tomorrow:
Futurism and Foresights Today

What if I told you that I had a great marketing innovation that would ensure that your brand would be in front of millions of eye balls?

What if I told you that this future focused marketing innovation would be updated regularly and enable your market segments to find you locally and nationally?

What if I told you that you could easily stand out against your competitors in this marketing innovation?

Well, you might just be interested. 

If I then told you that this marketing innovation would be sitting on your marketing segments’ doorsteps for weeks, that the only thing that would prevent it’s ink from decomposing together with the paper pulp would be the plastic wrapping around it as rains kept pounding its inefficient messages, and that people have moved on from paper-based search to online/mobile search, well you might not be as interested...

I wonder whether the marketing and sales teams of Yellow Pages ever asked themselves the critical question in today’s business environment:

• What if my product/service was totally irrelevant to our customer base in 12 months time?

If they had asked this question, they might have thought about scenario planning their future differently. 

While waves of change is smashing the Yellow Pages’ business model, this is a case study that we all need to pay close attention to. Any company can go from being Good to Great to Obsolete within a matter of months today.

The key contributor to this trend is that social media has totally disrupted the old marketing paradigm of focussing on demographics. In fact, we as marketers, must focus on psychographics. Our future thinking in marketing must be concerned with the values, attitudes, and beliefs of our market, as opposed to a narrow-minded demographic obsession with age, race, and gender. 

We are moving from demographics to psychographics and this enables markets a huge benefit from a tailoring perspective. 

This unique ability to connect with psychographic and highly individualised / eccentric groups of customers is perhaps best highlighted in the futuristic movie The Minority Report, where Tom Cruise plays the pre-crime detective, John Anderton. 

In this scene from a busy shopping mall, every advertisement that Tom Cruise walks past is totally targeted to his habits. Eye scanning software, loyalty cards, and credit card habits have all been carefully mapped, allowing for Amex, Lexus and Guiness to tailor commercial messages to John Anderton. This may seem far-fetched, but this form of tailored communication is the key reason why credit card companies, frequent flyer programs and retail giants are offering you incentives to part with your private, psychographic shopping habits. 

Tailored psychographics is also props up the disruptive business models of Google and Facebook. We think that using Google is free, but in fact what we pay every time we enter a search term or use Gmail is giving up key social data about our interests and future focus, enabling Google to sell our psychographic data to advertisers. 

Perhaps data wants to go social, and the social media case study of Facebook is not dissimilar to Google in this (ad)sense. You may have noticed how the increasingly sophisticated algorithms in Facebook is enabling this social network to target ads to your unique values, attitudes and beliefs.

Facebook might occasionally get it wrong. In fact, Facebook thinks that I am a Brooklyn Jew. Which may not be a bad guess considering I have Jewish family in New Jersey (not that far off), that I enjoy Brooklyn Beer, that I recently stayed in Brooklyn a couple of months ago, and that visited friends in Israel in 2011. Thus I frequently gets ads asking me if I am interested in learning Hebrew, or if I’d like to study the Torah. For now, I might put in this on hold, but it is interesting to note that even sophisticated algorithms can get it wrong. Perhaps I have fooled Facebook’s cookies that follow me around the social web. 

However, during a recent scenario planning and leadership program I ran in Queensland, the CIO of the organisation told me of a personal example of the potentially invasive/tailored application of marketing communications. This CIO had recently been using Facebook to communicate with his wife about their next holiday destination. Their chat started off by including keywords like ‘October Malaysia’, and within moments, ads for “Malaysia Truly Asia” started popping up. However after a couple more exchanges and looking at the favourable ‘exchange rate’ & ‘Hawaii’ keywords, Facebook started displaying flight and holiday packages to Maui for the romantic couple. They eventually decided to fly to Honolulu.

This type of tailored communication follows us around the social web, and it may seem both frightening and invasive. To some extent though, for someone that hates spam, I get oddly excited about tailored, relevant information that takes into account my interests, values and beliefs. 

Just as in gift giving, so in marketing, it’s the thought that counts. I remember an aunt of mine that used to give me totally unsuitable gifts as a child, and now I think about the psychographic impact of that (lacking) thought process. The thought that truly counts is what a person might be interested in, not the act of buying someone more stuff. We don’t need more stuff in our consumerist society. We need more tailored thought, and careful communication, and finally technology and the social web has enabled this to occur. 

If the Yellow Pages struggle with this social media case study, they can look to future thinking iconic brands like the London Double Decker buses for inspiration. This iconic grand dame of London branding now incorporates LCD advertising screen on the sides. Those screens communicate with the GPS devices on the bus, giving the LCD screens location specific data. The ads displayed on the LCD screens on the sides of the bus thus change depending on which neighbourhood the bus actually drive through. The LCD screens know that Julia Roberts in Notting Hill is a little bit more high maintenance than her friends down the road in Kensington and South Kensington.

In this regard, we may not be as far away as that futuristic scene from The Minority Report. This is what social media is doing to tailored marketing.

• What do you think about this trend from demographics to psychographics?
• What opportunities does this provide your marketing department?
• How can you use these social media case studies to better connect with your customers?

Key Take-Aways from this Blog

1. Companies need to focus their communications on the unique values, attitudes and beliefs of their customers
2. Companies' future thinking around marketing needs to focus on using social data to connect personally with each customer
3. No longer does race, age and gender give us much valuable information about customers

If you’re interested in this topic, why not buy the book Thinque Funky: Upgrade Your Thinking for the latest insights on trends in innovations, generations and communications and concrete ideas on how to best connect in a constantly shifting landscape.