Five Trends That Will Shape Marketing Segment In Next 5 Years

Piali Dasgupta Jan 18, 2023

We live in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world, where most businesses are not planning anything beyond 4 to 6 quarters. The world, in five years, is likely to change significantly, and some of the factors that will lead to this change are climate change, economic volatility, the dominance of technology and web 3.0 and inclusivity.

Marketing, as a discipline, will be impacted by all the above factors. The following are the five trends that will shape Marketing in the next five years.

1) The advent of a cookie-less future:

By the end of this year, 60 per cent of global web traffic will go cookie-less and Google will phase out third-party cookies from Chrome by the end of 2024. This is giving many marketers sleepless nights, as more than 70 per cent marketers have agreed to not being prepared for a cookie-less future. Before the digital environment becomes cookie-less in less than two years, brands have to shift focus to first-party data (customer data that they are collecting through forms, etc. and belongs to them) and reduce dependency on third-party data. Marketers will also have to work on building a more transparent relationship with customers, divulging how they would use the data they collect from customers. We will see a rise in contextual targeting in digital advertisement as well in the cookie-less future.

2) The rise of voice and audio:

According to Google, 27 per cent of the global population uses voice search on mobile. And in India, voice search has grown by 270 per cent in the last few years. Of course, the younger demographic (the 20-49 age group) are more prone to using voice search because it’s faster. However, we will see voice growing at a very rapid pace in the next five years, along with audio media such as podcasts gaining momentum. India is already the third largest podcast listening market in the world after USA and China. And, in the next five years, more and more brands will build an audio strategy as they realise that podcasts are a channel to build compelling brand narratives, create brand love and reach out to your audience in a high-engagement environment.

3) Possibilities with Metaverse and Web 3.0

Emerging technologies such as AI/ML/AR/VR and everything else that comprises web 3.0, will transform marketing. Irrespective of whether it will be scalable, Metaverse will be the centre of attention for marketers in the next five years. With several lifestyle and fashion brands in India and offshore already exploring metaverse, it will emerge as an important brand touchpoint for a niche audience as 5G takes over and will disrupt the experiential marketing space across the world.

4) Personalisation in the age of fragmented media

With the media landscape getting more and more fragmented each day, and newer channels of communicating and connecting with customers emerging frequently, personalisation of messaging would be a key requirement. Personalisation is being touted as the fifth and one of the most important Ps of Marketing. Personalisation is not unachievable today, given the amount of data one has access to, and also thanks to AI. An estimated 80 per cent of consumers today are keener to interact and transact with businesses that personalise the experience and the communication for them than those that don’t and send them irrelevant messages or show them irrelevant ads.

5) Influencer and meme marketing will become mainstream

Post the pandemic, most marketers have diverted a large chunk of their budgets to digital marketing, and currently, marketers are spending between 60 and 70 per cent of their budgets across digital channels. Given that the average internet user spends between three hours and seven hours online, brands have started putting a sizeable amount of their budgets into influencer marketing and meme marketing. There are about 2.5 to 3 million creators in India and by the end of 2028, this community is expected to drive marketing spending of USD 2.8 billion to USD 3.5 billion, as per reports.

Meme marketing, on the other hand, has emerged as a great way to instil humour and become a part of online conversations for brands. There are hundreds of meme-making apps, and meme marketing has grown at a faster pace in India than in any other market, given that the average age of our 1.4 billion strong population is 29 and 52 per cent of the country’s population is under 30.