The customer journey impacts virtually every angle of your business, and it’s been disrupted in a major way by the pandemic. What, where, when, how and why we buy were all challenged in 2020. E-Commerce, delivery services, omni channel, remote work, and do-it-yourself exploded. Curb-side pick-up became a thing, touchless payment became the norm, and if it could be digitized and … [Read more...]
10 Marketing Trends for 2021
As we all learned last year, predicting the future can be challenging, if not impossible. Every January I take a look at trends to be mindful of for the coming year. My five 2020 predictions were tracking well until March, and then the world tossed us a new playbook. Remarkably however, several of them actually held up quite well - including my wildcard suggestion to buy … [Read more...]
New Behaviours Becoming Habits & Habits at Scale Becoming Trends
As we enter the eighth month since the pandemic began, it is becoming evident that many changed behaviours are becoming habits. While external forces such as lock downs, concern for safety, or just plain availability and changed distribution systems may have prompted the initial shift, along the way we've seen internal reasons emerge for staying with the new pattern - we found … [Read more...]
In Search of Serendipity
I’ve noticed a curious thing recently, and it relates directly back to creativity and the ability to track trends, which is at the heart of marketing and entrepreneurship. I think of myself as a reasonably creative person and one that spots trends early, but I’ve realized that a lot of that ability stems from serendipity – chance encounters, discussions with strangers, … [Read more...]
Being Word of Mouth Worthy
I’ll freely admit to being someone who gets more excited about letters than numbers. As in I’d much rather play with words and sentence structure, than statistics or budgets. However, a couple numbers caught my eye while reading a piece of research from Rutgers University related to consumer behavior and marketing: - 70% of word of mouth conversations happen face-to-face - … [Read more...]