2013

Looking ahead at 2013 with our magic mirror leaves some doubt for any accuracy of predictions, but every year at this time, it’s always a fun exercise to watch the community of thinkers publish their annual lists for the coming year.

2013 – The Year of Engagement

Big Idea 2013: Engagement

“The antithesis of engagement is alienation, but that is too strong a word for what is in fact a milder, cooler, and more distant reality. Let’s call it instead detachment. The economic consequences of detachment are reflected initially in a loss of brand loyalty, which then tends to lead to price shopping, which ultimately leads to churn. Such dynamics are the kiss of death to a consumer economy.”

“The highest returns in tech in the coming decade will come from investments in engagement”Geoffrey Moore

The Brainyard Blog (Information Week)– one of my favorites, had a response to Geoffrey’s Big Idea 2013 post by Eric Lundquist, that offers some interesting challenges for CMO’s. Eric writes: “The issue for chief marketing officers, as I see it, is how to create customer engagement in an era when it is simple for a customer to disengage.”

With the rising importance of Customer Experience and our focus on Customer Engagement here at Oracle, we are seeing the thought leadership of major marketing powerhouse agencies offer their trend observations as well.

JWT

The following review of the report THE TOP 10 TRENDS FOR MARKETERS, ACCORDING TO JWT by: Rae Ann Fera provides some fascinating perspectives supporting the importance of experience across the channels of engagement.

JWT’s 10 trends for 2013 are:

1. Play As a Competitive Advantage
2. The Super Stress Era
3. Intelligent Objects
4. Predictive Personalization
5. The Mobile Fingerprint
6. Sensory Explosion
7. Everything Is Retail
8. Peer Power
9. Going Private in Public
10. Health & Happiness: Hand in Hand
    

Deloitte

Deloitte Top 10 Tech Trends for 2013: Your password is no longer safe, your wireless calls may drop and other predictions. 
Tech Trends 2013 videos : Learn how the 2013 trends are impacting business today in this series of three-minute videos from Deloitte.

The major analyst firms of Gartner and Forrester have published fascinating 2013 prediction articles and reports which will give us all a guidepost as we navigate the coming year’s challenges.

Gartner

Gartner’s list covers many of the same trends they listed for 2012 which leaves us understandably with the knowledge that these are not a passing fancy of a trend, but instead trends that will take years to develop and evolve.

Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013 include:

1. Mobile Device Battles
2. Mobile Applications and HTML5
3. Personal Cloud
4. Enterprise App Stores
5. The Internet of Things
6. Hybrid IT and Cloud Computing
7. Strategic Big Data
8. Actionable Analytics
9. In Memory Computing
10. Integrated Ecosystems

Forrester

2013: THE YEAR OF DIGITAL BUSINESS

My favorite quote from this article: “Although the benefits of social media marketing may yet turn out to be the modern version of The Emperor’s New Clothes, 2013 will continue the shift in businesses across the world toward a more open, innovative, and collaborative environment."

Capgemini

• Our friends at Capgemini have a couple of CTO blog posts addressing the business and IT trends. .
• 8 Innovating Ways for your Business of Tomorrow - Adam Lewis alternatively spells out some key areas for innovation for the coming year
• For the IT Spin in a very insightful piece: 7 IT Trends for 2013 by Ron Tolido

Taking the converse approach in a critical post by Eric Anderson– gives us a good view of “6 tech trends you can ignore in 2013”

The Holy Grail

Perhaps the best find in my research over the past few weeks has been the treasure chest of someone else’s research efforts. Stumbling upon this site left me giddy in satisfaction that I had found the holy grail of trend and prediction lists pulled together by IBM Lifer, Bill Chamberlin on his site, Bill Chamberlin's HorizonWatching. Spend some time browsing this impressive compilation – there’s something for everyone here: 101 Technology Trends and Predictions Lists for 2013

Bill digs deeper into multiple individual trends that have been called out for the upcoming year.

My favorites of his collection:

103 Digital Marketing Trends and Prediction Lists for 2013

28 Internet of Things (IoT) Trends and Prediction Articles for 2013

19 Gamification Trend Articles for 2013

Creative and Strategic Perspectives

What about the Creative and Strategic Leaders today? What do they think about these evolving trends?

I discovered a very interesting article on Fast Company's "Create" site that interviewed leaders from both creative and strategy in top agencies. Definitely take the time to read the full article linked here. I've tried to capture some of the more interesting quotes below.

HOW MARKETING WILL CHANGE IN 2013

CREATIVE FORECAST:

• Advances in mobile technology
• No set platforms
• More content, on more screens, in more sizes, in more places, more of the time.
• Videos on mobile devices
• Technology slowdown: Creatives today, like their smartphones, must be able to do everything. And well.
• Globalization

“The past decade plus was about learning new technologies, new platforms, new threads of connectivity about brands. This next decade will be a return to storytelling and craft.”- Jason Gaboriau, VP, executive creative director CP+B

“Marketers will continue to ask for more ROI often with the same spending levels and sometimes less.” - Jonathan Cude, chief creative officer, McKinney

“Undoubtedly, technological advances are forcing brands to be less preoccupied with what to say and more with how to say it. And what invariably happens is that different brands’ messages all begin to resemble one another. Every day there seem to be more and more similar ideas coming from different clients…even within different categories. Innovation is taking a front seat and the brand’s architecture is being put on the back burner. As a result, the messages behind brands are becoming less and less unique.”- Maxi Itzkoff/Mariano Serkin, chief creative officers, Del Campo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi Bueno Aires:

“Our teams here at the agency work in tandem with one another--dropping the silos and alternatively embracing collaboration among community management, social strategy, digital word of mouth, content studio, creative and technology. That is how creative success will be realized in 2013.”- Adam Kerj, chief creative officer, 360i

THE STRATEGIC FORECAST

Read this article!

Here’s a sampling of the interesting discussions from one of these strategic thinkers.

Jim Stengel, marketing consultant and educator, author, former CMO of P&G:

“This will be the year of The Drop. We will drop social from social media as all media is social; we will drop digital and mobile from digital & mobile marketing as all marketing is digital and mobile; we will drop advertising from advertising agency as their future is in helping clients creatively realize opportunities; we will drop global from global marketing officer as all marketing leaders need to be global in thought and intent. You get the idea: we are entering an era of integration and simplification as people/consumers want coherence, impact, joy, and help from people running brands.

The year of even higher Ideals. This is gathering momentum. I have had a crazy busy year helping large and small companies--more than 25--activate their higher ideal in all they do. Look at big Cannes winners last year: Chipotle, Nike, Coke, Prudential, Visa and on and on. All centered on a higher ideal that is activated beautifully and completely. These companies are growing and writing the new story for business.

More profoundly: the year of Us versus Me. Obama won decisively as he was the inclusive, generous, empathetic candidate. Romney was more exclusive, more individualistic. The coming policy/economic changes will be more shared responsibility to make progress on the deficit, tax revenues, health care. The national social impact of the horrific Newtown tragedy will be a softening of our "hard lines" on many issues, our empathy will be heightened. Do not underestimate the lasting impact of that event. People running brands need to internalize this and reflect it. It will supercharge the movement to higher ideals.”

These are really interesting perspectives on the changes and trends upon us in 2013 and beyond. It is definitely NOT Business as Usual and requires some re-thinking around engagement with not only your customers, but also your own employees and partners. Remember that Engaged Employees help to cultivate Engaged Customers.

Our last Social Business Thought Leader in 2012, Brian Solis, was sponsoring the change of business perspective in his book, The End of Business as Usual and provided a scintillating discussion on dealing with these new challenges.

Digital Darwinism: How Brands Can Survive the Rapid Evolution of Society and Technology

Oracle Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast Series

This is the age in which society and technology evolve faster than a company’s ability to adapt. Can your brand survive? Join Altimeter Group analyst Brian Solis as he discusses how to not just survive but thrive by better understanding customer expectations, disruptive technology, and the new opportunities of the age.