Five reasons why you should ignore all marketing trends for 2020

Virtual influencers. Voice search. Hypertargeting. Chatbots. TikTok. You’d be foolish to ignore these marketing trends for 2020. That is, if you like to chime in on the latest trends - which seems to be a popular pastime in marketing land, judging by the number of trend lists that flood the internet around this time of the year. But how much attention should you really pay to these annual predictions? Not much, I will argue, for the following five reasons.

1. Focusing on the latest trends can make you short-sighted

“Our society has reorientated itself to the present moment,” media theorist Douglas Rushkoff wrote in 2013. “Everything is now live, real time, and always-on.” Rushkoff called it present shock, and predicted a surge in short-term thinking as a result of our fixation on the here and now. It turned out to be a prescient warning.

If there’s one troubling reality we should have woken up to over the past decade, it’s how digital communication technology plays into our human tendency towards impatience and impulsiveness. 

More and more, we find ourselves tricked into the illusion that everything is urgent. When we see a notification, we feel an irresistible urge to click on it. When a topic starts trending, we feel compelled to add our take on it before the hype fizzles out. Never before in history was it so easy to succumb to the whims of the moment and spend our days in a continuous state of distraction. But against what cost?

It’s a question we should also ask ourselves as marketers when we feel tempted to jump on the latest bandwagon in search of quick success.

Thanks to digital technology we are now much better able to measure the instant effect of communications activities and advertising campaigns. Our eyes light up with anticipation as the likes, clicks, and page views accumulate in our dashboards. Results are directly visible - just as addictive as the notifications that keep us glued to our smartphones.

But what if chasing the latest trends and short-term results distracted us from what determines success in the long run? What if the results that really matter elude measurement in the short term, and only become visible after weeks, months, or even years?

What if chasing the latest trends and short-term results distracted us from what determines success in the long run?

A brand cannot be built in a spreadsheet. It can only be built, over time, in people's hearts and minds. Marketing follows a simple and timeless law: you reap what you sow. If we forget to sow because all we pay attention to is now, there will be nothing left to reap tomorrow.

This is not just a theoretical risk. Earlier this year in Cannes, Peter Field revealed research showing that over the past ten years, long-term advertising campaigns have increasingly given way to short-term campaigns. It’s a disquieting trend considering the importance of balancing these two time horizons - as Field and fellow researcher Les Binet demonstrated in their seminal study ‘The Long and the Short of It’.

The tide seems to be changing, however. In a laudable exercise of self-reflection, prominent marketers from various brands acknowledged in 2019 that they got so caught up in short-term performance optimization, that they lost sight of long-term goals (see examples here and here).

I think there’s something to learn here for all of us. More than ever before, we should be mindful of the dangers of a myopic focus on what is instantly measurable and visible, and keep our eyes on the horizon as well. In an era of 'present shock', long-term planning and patience could very well be your most powerful marketing weapons. Which brings us to the next point.

2. A strong brand is built through consistency

What makes hypes and trends so alluring is that they appeal to our desire for novelty. After running the same advertising campaign four times or blogging about the same topic for six months, surely it’s time for something new. Is it really, though? 

Another timeless truth of marketing is that a strong and valuable brand is built through repetition. In today’s rat race for instant engagement, one may feel tempted to replace strategy with #trendingtopics. It certainly sounds very agile. But in the end, the only 'engagement' that matters is the strength of the memory associations you build over time; which calls for consistency - not constant change.

In the end, the only 'engagement' that matters is the strength of the memory associations you build over time; which calls for consistency, not constant change.

Were you looking forward to this year's John Lewis Christmas commercial as much as I was? The power of consistency.

Are you curious whether your favorite blogger, vlogger, or podcaster has recently published new content? The power of consistency.

The most successful and enduring brands capitalize on repetition, not hypes and trends. They find new and surprising ways of capturing your attention, but first and foremost, they reinforce what makes them distinctive and memorable. John Bartle coined a beautiful term for it: imaginative repetition. You won’t read about it in this December’s trends lists, but while others are rushing to be the first to create interactive TikTok stories, you could use it to your benefit.

3. The latest tools and tactics are not a substitute for strategy

Speaking of TikTok (for the last time in this article): another consequence of our field’s obsession with the latest trends and buzzwords is that tools and tactics tend to dominate discussions at the expense of strategy.

Mark Ritson calls it the tactification of marketing. Or, to quote the always insightful and foulmouthed professor: “All this talk of social media platforms, virtual quality and 3D f*cking printing is missing the point - the strategic point - of marketing.”

What Ritson refers to when he talks strategy? Market research. Segmentation. Positioning. Not exactly the most talked-about aspects of marketing in popular discourse today. But still pretty essential as precursors to every decision that follows. 

The deceiving thing about tactics these days is that they often take on a veneer of strategy. Add the suffix ‘strategy’ to any tactic that is currently in vogue (influencer marketing strategy, video marketing strategy) and it sounds so much more strategic. A tool is still a tool, however. Without an underlying strategy to direct its use, all this frantic activity may only amount to more noise in a world already saturated with content.

In fact, it may follow from your strategy that some tools and tactics are better left unused. What if your target audience is more into text than into video? And maybe there are more effective ways to promote your latest liability assurance product than hiring an Instagram influencer with 40,000 fake followers to take selfies on a beach in Bali.

Strategy means having the guts to say ‘no’.

Strategy means having the guts to say ‘no’. To focus on what truly matters. And to ignore everything else. Even if - and maybe especially when - everyone else is talking about it. 

This has another reason, by the way.

4. New is not necessarily better

Today’s rapid pace of technological development can instill the feeling that you are lagging behind if you are not on top of the latest trends. Fueled by fear of missing out, we latch onto every opportunity. But is new always better?

One of the most soulless places I visited this year was Songdo in South Korea: the world’s most advanced smart city, built from the ground up on a 600-hectare parcel of artificial land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. Smart technology has been embedded into every building and into every street corner. Songdo was supposed to be a mecca of innovation. There is only one problem: people are staying away. One journalist even likened it to a ‘Chernobyl-like ghost town’ (I captured Songdo’s half-empty buildings in a photo series).

As marketers, we also run the risk of becoming so fixated on the latest technologies that we forget the human essence of our profession. If an advertisement or piece of content is poorly written or designed and fails to stir up an intellectual or emotional response, even the world’s most sophisticated marketing automation platform will not make it more effective. Maybe what we need as marketers is not more technology - but instead, more creativity, more good-old craftsmanship, and a bit more empathy with our audiences.

As marketers, we run the risk of becoming so fixated on the latest technologies that we forget the human essence of our profession.

Pick up a copy of Cialdini’s ‘Influence’ (1984) or ‘Ogilvy on Advertising’ (1985) - I guarantee that you will learn more from these timeless classics than from the latest blog post on self-learning chatbots or augmented influencers (I'm not sure what these are, either).

And here’s another lesson we can draw from the last decade: just because technology makes something possible, doesn’t always make it a good idea. 

Take hypertargeting. (Re-)read ‘How Brands Grow’ by Byron Sharp and ask yourself how far you want to go with targeting specific segments of (potential) buyers if that means that you will only reach your full target audience incidentally. You may be unintentionally eroding your brand and profit margins over time, despite an uplift in short-term sales.

Don’t get me wrong: technological innovation can be pivotal to achieving marketing success in today’s world. But don’t let it become a goal in itself. In 2020, we will still be marketing to people, not robots. If we pause for a moment to learn from past wisdom, maybe then we will realize that new is not necessarily better. Or as David Sax puts it in this terrific article: “Some of our best ideas are in the rearview mirror.”

5. Those who follow the crowd tend to get lost in it

So is there really no reason to follow the latest marketing trends?

There is actually one. And that’s if you’re looking for a safe haven. Buzzwords are so widespread that no one will frown on you if you occasionally insert them into a sentence. Mention a buzzword often enough and you may even get invited to speak about it at a marketing conference.

Stop chasing the new and the popular. Start focusing on the essential.

The obsession with quick hacks and passing trends is symptomatic of a time in which popularity trumps nuance. They offer a mental shortcut in times of information overload. Why think critically for yourself when someone else has already done the thinking?

Well, perhaps that’s exactly what we need to do a bit more often: carve out the time and space to reflect for ourselves, instead of following the crowd. To define our own strategy. To stop chasing the new and the popular, and to start focusing on the essential.

So don’t let 2020 be the year in which you will be copying what everyone else is doing (or claims to be doing).

Let 2020 be the year in which you embrace what makes you and your brand different.

Cartoons: Tom Fishburne | Photos: Tristan Lavender Photography

Graph 'Shiny New Object Syndrome': Jan Sullivan, Quora

Views in this article are my own. Let me know if you (dis)agree in the comment section below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.