Our world is changing, people are changing and technology is now very rapidly evolving. Encompassing and moving beyond all the latest trends, including the Green wave and a healthier, value-minded consumer, is the new wave of brand communication that seeks to reach consumers on a more personal level than ever. What is absolutely fascinating is that technology has become the catalyst to this more personal level of brand communication.
Increasingly, the trend of user engagement versus the typical disruptive role of marketing has become an established point of view for leading brand marketers across consumer categories. Now brands across the board are beginning to come around to the fact that they must find ways to be useful to the consumer rather than used, and the convincing of that fact must be done face-to-face, or lately, palm-to-palm.
Here’s what I mean:
Engagement in the social aspect of consumers’ lives has reached a level where brands are engrained by providing platforms for information and communication, such as websites with message boards and allowing access to immediate customer support through social media messaging platforms such as Twitter. As the consumer becomes more mobile, marketing touch points must also become mobile. Moving beyond the established trinity of Facebook, Myspace and Twitter, branded tech applications that are useful to the consumer and available through mobile technology are decidedly the future in marketing communication.
I can not stress enough the value of packaging with incentives that are scan-able by mobile device as well as products that drive to web and provide product information. These types of point-of-sale communications will be the most in line with current and future purchasing trends.
This April, iPhone introduced yet another app that allows the user to take a photo of an ingredients label off of any packaged good to accurately determine whether the product is vegetarian-friendly. While this and all the other $1.99 apps are the current consumer rage, they could very well be replaced with a free, scan-able barcode that shows the Veg-friendliness, the organic farm origin, or the calorie content of any packaged good. We are right on the cusp of this type of technology and this is precisely the kind of edge a new or established brand could use in a crowded market.
As we move forward into a new decade with new technologies unfolding almost weekly, it is absolutely vital for consumer brands to find ways to engage product purchasers through these new avenues, communicate through the channel of mobile communication, and invest in the innovation of the future tools of engagement.
Rochelle Fainstein
Tweet this | Tags: brand, communication, engagement, green, packaging, point-of-sale, social media, technology
