9 Business Predictions Smart Brands Should Pay Attention To

HGTV_2015CASTAndreas von der Heydt, Director of Kindle at Amazon, predicted what smart businesses will do in 2016 to strengthen their brands and promote their products.

“I believe in 2016 we will move from a ‘Mad Men creativity-driven marketing era’ to an age of ‘Predictive analytics and holistic software platforms,’” he says, in “What The Best Brands Will Do In 2016,” an article published on LinkedIn. “This will enable us to create compelling new content being engineered by data and focus on building huge distribution in a scalable manner.”

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We have summarized some of Von der Heydt’s predictions here.

1. Customer know-how and simplicity are the basis. People have more choice than ever, but they want to spend as little time as possible choosing what is right for them.

2. Big data and analytics are at the heart of modern marketing. The ability to develop an integrated, analytical view of customer activities and business operations will enable brands to design personalized and still simple marketing strategies and tactics.

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3. Social media sells. Social selling needs to be fully incorporated in marketing and sales strategy in 2016.

4. Meet and target Generation Z. Generation Z’s (born between the mid- to late-1990s and 2010) ease with digital technology presents both opportunities and challenges.

5. Mobile and location-based marketing will make fixed thinking redundant. Smart marketers will put even more money on mobile-focused marketing and will also target more strongly users at the point of engagement in 2016.

6. Artificial intelligence, wearables, virtual reality, and robots are here to stay. Machine intelligence capabilities have been steadily growing, and new methods of computing may again set the industry on supersonic development speeds.

7. Moving images and video become the ultimate king of the content jungle. The rise of video will further increase in 2016.

8. Data security. As a top marketer, one of your biggest worries should be cyber-security and how to ensure the safety of your customers’ data.

9. Employee advocacy as a major social currency. To build a strong brand, you need brand ambassadors, i.e. employees who are thoroughly engaged, highly committed,
and authentic.

Von der Heydt summed up his article with this caution, saying that with the many opportunities coming from big data, video, and other sources, brands should be careful not to over-complicate marketing and not to neglect who really matters: Their customers and audience.

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