Source: www.forbes.com
If 2023 was the year of business acceleration, 2024 was the year of the tortoise with a haze of business lethargy we haven’t quite seen before. This malaise was likely spurred by a variety of reasons that go beyond economic headwinds to business paralysis instigated by global unrest and national uncertainty around the impending election. However, in addition to all of these external forces, many brands appeared uncertain of where to go next with their newly transformed organizations as customers remained resigned, lacking loyalty and unwilling to spend. This new paradigm left many CEOs unclear on where to trim the fat and where to double down on growth.
Within these sea changes, we watched a new breed of uber CMO arise—one prepared to help their CEOs chart the course required for success in the future. As 2025 unfolds, the core focus of the C-Suite, with CMOs leading the charge, will be to find new and innovative ways to meet rising consumer expectations and better understand their behavior. This will require a return to spending by both companies and the customers they serve. The game of chicken around “non-consumption core,” the moniker created to describe the trend of tapered spending over the last several months, will require companies to go full steam ahead with wise corporate investments that bring consumers back into the fold. If brands thought the bar had risen to its ultimate threshold, they will need to think again. Customer expectations continue to mount around everything from more meaningful personalization, respect for their data privacy, and a need for both convenience and improved authenticity.
Achieving these new mandates will come down to less talk and more action around embracing AI as a solution that is leveraged in ways that find a balance between the power of the technology, while not foregoing the importance of human touch. Finding the right disruptive technologies that can offer both agile and predictive consumer intelligence, be it emotional, functional or otherwise will be the leading trend in 2025. This and only this will help brands stay ahead of consumer demands and foster competitive distinction through inimitable customer experiences.
With all that said, following are the Top 4 Insights brands and their leadership need to keep most top of mind as the new year unfolds.
INSIGHT 1
AI DISRUPTS CONSUMER INSIGHTS BUT HUMAN INPUT MUST REMAIN INTACT.
After years of spending billions on digital transformation, dollars will finally be allocated to help reimagine the market research function to better predict trends. Using AI effectively and efficiently to help evolve market research and develop deeper customer understanding that delivers better experiences will be a critical strategic imperative.
It will become clear that when AI is used as an ingredient to solve for specific pain points, paired with direct human input, results will be more tangible and it will become far easier to separate the hype from the reality. While there are many advantages to using AI in market research, it’s also important to remember the pitfalls. In particular, that machines can’t replace humans and AI predictions can be wrong based off of unconscious biases not seen by AI as well as hallucinations that can often occur.
As Gen AI, GPTs and LLMs continue to proliferate, it will also be vital for brands to understand that these tools are only as good as the data put into them, and first party data sets will not be enough to sustain them. The time for datasets that are less behavioral and more emotional is now. Qualitative means of understanding are great, but sentiment analysis in today’s day and age will not be enough to trigger the type of action that brands need to to improve loyalty, trust and overall spend. Data yielded from market research will need to deliver on the new hat trick: being able to be emotionally predictive, precise and quantifiable.
INSIGHT 2
BRAND LOYALTY MUST BE REACTIVATED THROUGH BRAND LOVE.
The future of digital marketing and continued successful transformation efforts will rely heavily on new and innovative means of data collection and analysis, that is done in privacy compliant ways. While a lot of this is already happening with Gen AI and LLMs, more informative data defining how people feel and what they want must be put towards rethinking brand love. There have been many ways of assessing brand health in the past, yet nothing has ever been precise enough to become a singular industry standard.
Recommending a brand is not a complex enough metric on its own to determine if someone loves and trusts a brand. This is why we see so many brands struggling to action NPS data. Quantifiable brand trust and loyalty data is the new must have in any CMOs toolkit. The problem? Datasets like these don’t come off the shelf and most often require a blend of building and buying, not an either-or scenario. Meanwhile as the cost of acquisition continues to rise, retention is a new mandate.
The ultimate Holy Grail in 2025 will be rebuilding trust and loyalty with consumers by establishing emotional attachment. Developing the means to quantify a brand’s love by segment is the most important part of a marketing organization that needs to evolve and using more precise means of emotional understanding will be critical in doing so. It will also be important to ensure whatever AI being used in developing these new brand love or health metrics does not lose the individual voice of the customer so that brand value is not compromised.
INSIGHT 3
PERSONALIZATION AND RESPONSIBLE DATA COLLECTION COLLIDE.
While personalization has been talked about for over a decade, the confluence of the rising use of AI and automation, married with the maturation of digital marketing will make personalization at scale a strategic imperative. Translation: we need to stop talking the talk and start walking the walk. Using old toolkits to do so, will no longer cut it.
In addition, as billions of dollars have been spent on transformation, funds will finally start being put toward not just overall market research, but deeper customer understanding in particular. This will happen through the building or buying of technologies that create more innovative data stacks and Consumer Data Platforms.
Vital to these efforts will be the responsible collection of data, in ways where consumers opt-in and share truly meaningful information about themselves such as emotional feedback about how they feel versus static information about how they might act. This comes at a time when data privacy concerns are mounting and marketers are being pushed to find new means of data collection. This will lead to the proliferation of platforms and new offerings that offer more modern means of generating data that can serve to enrich existing datasets. Net net: customer understanding can no longer be static where insights are yielded annually versus daily, weekly or monthly if personalization is for once and all to become a reality. Doing so will require extremely personalized campaigns and offers that anticipate consumer needs before they are expressed, while still making the consumer feel in control.
INSIGHT 4
THE NEW AGE OF INFLUENCER MARKETING
Influencer marketing is another area that gets a reboot right alongside personalization. While we have seen the rise of influencers over the past decade, the age of Influencer 2.0 has begun. The New Yorker recently unveiled a significant story called the age of cultural curators and this is a nod to this new age of influence. No longer are influencers dancing on Tik Tok for one brand at a time, or doing beauty tricks on You-Tube in the hope of sponsorship. Today brand influencers are curating the lives of their loyal followers across platform.
Key to this phenomenon will be data-driven means of both selecting influencers by leveraging technology like AI that can help assure that an influencer maps well to both the brand its representing as well as the key segments the brand is trying to reach. It will also be imperative for marketers to lean into new technologies and solutions that help them more scientifically and strategically map the ROI an influencer is bringing to a brand via new metrics. These metrics will need to demonstrate quantifiable business results versus offerings to date that either feel more “black boxish” or offer softer metrics like awareness and impressions.
Lastly, as consumers become more discerning, authenticity and transparency in influencer-brand partnerships will be crucial. Brands must collaborate with influencers who genuinely align with their values and resonate with their audience. This has always been the case, but as the age of mistrust grows, these points will only become more critical. As a result, more surgical approaches to using influencers will continue to rise, such as the use of more niche or micro influencers, that reach less people potentially, but do so in ways that radiate authenticity and trust. Creating long-term relationships with influencers versus temporary or ones more episodic in nature will also improve brand engagement and advocacy.