Buying trends is a waste of money if you don’t know how to use them, says
Dennis Wong, Project Director at brand development and marketing insight consultancy, atAdded Value Australia.
Trends are often misused by marketers. Too commonly they are taken at face value, wrung through an ideation session and spat out as undifferentiated, category generic innovation. Worse still, this usually happens late in the game, when all of the smaller, more nimble and edgy competitors are already onto the next big thing.
You could bet that there’s not one FMCG marketer who hasn’t been in some sort of workshop to brainstorm ‘Health and Wellness’ ideas, only to find at the end of the day there’s only so many ways you can market a low-carb product. At best, the approach is a hit and miss exercise.
Or take the shift towards consumer generated content and two-way brand conversations. Marketing media are filled with sorry stories of brands that have unwittingly jumped on the social media bandwagon to their peril because they haven’t truly understood the trend underpinning the technology.
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