ACTUA NEWS
29/01/2009: TRENDS - Top 5 Marketing Trends
The Top Five Marketing Trends according to Marketing Executives Networking Group
- Insight and innovation viewed as keys to combat down economic and business cycles; Marketers indicated market research and development would either stay the same or increase in 2009.
- Customer satisfaction and customer retention remained the top two marketing concepts followed by marketing ROI, brand loyalty and segmentation, which represents a “Back to Core Principles” approach to marketing. Of the 62 identified marketing concepts, faith-based marketing, six sigma, game theory, anti-americanism and immigration were viewed as the least important.
- The issue of global warming showed the largest decrease in importance (dropping 14 places in the rankings), while green marketing showed a statistically significant 5% drop.
- Twice as many marketers are “sick” of hearing about Web 2.0 and related buzzwords such as “blogs” and “social networking” compared to last year’s survey; however, marketers still admit they don’t know enough about it. This was evident in the results of a social media study MENG released on November 6, 2008 showing 67% of executive marketers consider themselves beginners when it comes to using social media for marketing purposes.
- Despite well-publicized quality issues over the last year, China ranked the number one greatest area of opportunity for marketers with international responsibility. India was a distant second with only 17% of respondents.
Interesting to note, offshoring has significantly diminished in favor as significantly more executives this year (58% vs. 49% in 2008) agreed that offshoring ‘is not as profitable as others think, and is fraught with risk’. Marketing executives also still feel Boomers represent the best opportunity for customer targeting. However, the perceived importance of Generation X and Generation Y grew significantly compared to 2008.
For a complete copy of survey results, visit www.mengonline.com/visitors/newsroom.