It’s that time of year again. Eggnog time.
I look forward to slowing down and enjoying the season. It’s also a good time to reflect on the past 12 months, and to look ahead at the year to come. I like to take stock of trends my clients and I observed, and to get ahead of those clients by reading the tea leaves on movements and patterns that are expected to emerge.
It was a very busy year for clients. It started with a bang and they ran flat out until June, raising or optimizing prices, releasing new products, and exploring new markets. Summer was strangely quiet, for all kinds of reasons, ranging from economic jitters about Europe, to concerns about consumer confidence at home. I think executives and marketers were just fatigued, finally stopping for some rest after a 24-month battle to recover from the recession.
It was also a frantic year for consumers. Spending rebounded, at least for the bulk of the year. And in 2011, consumers were introduced to some new technologies en masse: cloud computing and storage, high-definition screens on smartphones, and tablets beyond the iPad. But the expectation of tremendous value never faded, and consumers appeared to flock toward low-priced goods and accessible-premium goods again.
At this time last year, the new trends I thought 2011 would bring were:
- Greening the business. The return of green, as a response to changing employee attitudes and a necessity in recruiting talent, more so than a response to consumer pressure.
- The talent war. Finding sufficient skilled talent, and managing four generations in any one business – with millennials the major concern, taking the focus off of customers.
- Qualitative data. A desire for deep, ethnographic customer data, moving away from a numbers-only decision-making process to a position of rich market understanding.
I’m not sure the green movement roared back in the way I or my clients envisioned, but sustainability is once again en vogue, and the media is paying attention to environmental issues again. The talent war hurting customer experience, and the desire for ethnographic data did play out as predicted. I spent the first half of the year basically in-field full time with my clients’ customers, and those same clients were wrapped up in talent searches, restructuring, and Gen Y management training – to the detriment of customer service. (Note: customers are brave enough to complain about service levels again.)
Here are customer-oriented trends from 2011 that are likely to carry forward:
Content curation and guided choice
Customers are inundated with information and messaging. and they are inundated with choices. They are overwhelmed. Customers are fed up. They are exhausted. And they are not looking for more choice, or more customization options – they are looking for a little help.
‘Content curation’ is a term I heard my clients use a lot in 2011. It means helping sift through loads of options for customers, and presenting them with only a few based on the reviews of experts of some sort. And the model of guided choice – such as the Dell computer purchase process, or the Yogen Fruz menu – seemed to come alive everywhere, replacing models that would have allowed for pure customization.
The consumer world is not likely to become less complex or less noisy, and I see these trends continuing into 2012 and beyond, and creeping into spaces that really need them, such as consumer packaged goods where, for example, soap and laundry detergent options seem endless and therefore stressful to a cohort of customers.
Accessible premium
The idea of accessible premiumization is one I first researched in 2010, noticing an increasing range of offerings with higher-but-not-too-high price points and lovely packaging, in what you could argue are commodity categories. The fundamental characteristics of an accessible premium brand are:
- Product: measurably better but not fundamentally different from competitors.
- Price: in the range of two times higher versus the average priced product in the category.
- Distribution: widely distributed, in conventional malls, grocers, drug marts.
- Packaging: unique packaging or meticulous presentation.
- Back story: a well-documented history of the brand or product, founder or production facility.
- Production: unique production process and product nomenclature.
- Promotion: niche events such as individual sports and industry parties.
Grey Goose vodka, Fiji water and Coach handbags are older examples of accessible premium brands, and 2011 saw the emergence of more: Hendrick’s in the gin category, J Brand in denim and even Rembrandt in toothpaste. (I know each of these brands was introduced prior to 2011, but they really materialized as mainstream options this past year.)
