[TrendTalk] 2020 marketing vision

While many people don't believe in five-year plans any more, because change has accelerated at such a pace in the past decade, big business is still enamoured with them and the latest trend is putting a catchy '2020' vision out there. There's been a glut of 2020 marketing predictions put out in the last couple of weeks.

Research conducted supports the view that 'a connected future' and the digital technologies that will enable it are among the top five priorities of marketers polled, for the next five years. eMarketer quotes research from November last year by the Economist Intelligence Unit, that Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and senior marketing executives globally, believe that the "biggest effect on marketers by 2020" will be the Internet of Things. Along with mobile personalisation; wearables and virtual/augmented reality.

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eMarketer also cites research conducted in December 2014 by both PricewaterhouseCoopers and Millward Brown to support this. PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 65% of CEOs worldwide view the Internet of Things as "a digital technology that was strategically important". Millward Brown showed that digital marketers in the US ranked the Internet of Things in their top five key priorities for 2015, along with big data and cloud software.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is defined by Gartner as such: "The network of dedicated physical objects (things) that contain embedded technology to sense or interact with their internal state or external environment. The IoT comprises an ecosystem that includes things, communication, applications and data analysis."

Best that marketers and CEOs put the Internet of Things at the top of their to do lists already and ensure they have a full understanding of the technology and the inherent opportunities, as Gartner (as reported by eMarketer too) forecasts that the installed base of Internet of Things devices worldwide will rise from 4.88 billion to 25 billion between 2015 and 2020.

When Fast Company (US) asked the influencers on its annual Most Innovative Companies list in the category advertising/marketing for their predictions for the next five years, what was apparent was that the "complexity of marketing" was going to keep increasing, fuelled in part by the leaps in innovation presented by new technologies.

Fast Company came up with a broader range of predictions from the brands specialists asked to contribute, that also included the fact that brands need to "work on a timeline that matches culture, not ad campaigns"; and of course that technology would have a massive impact with "the continued growth of mobile and its attendant impact on brand messaging, the continued rise of video and virtual reality, to data and the place of technology in the marketing continuum"; as well as "the shrinking of the product development cycle".

Technology will in fact "become the core fabric of marketing itself", reports Fast Company, in the long form article worth reading in full for the great insights presented for marketers, agencies, media owners and anyone in the branding game.