As an integrated marketer, one of the things that I look for is great research institutions that are putting out free research that will help my clients as well as my students at Northwestern and on Coursera. Edelman Research is one such company. They recently published their trends for 2020 which are significant trends that you need to think about for business and marketing. Edelman Research is one of my go-to research houses. Their Edelman Trust Barometer is one of the best measures of how we as consumers trust companies, social media, news reporting, and other institutions and government. It's a must read for IMC marketers. I also like their published special reports on things like trends and trust in social media and in digital marketing. The first trend is that more and more people are listening to podcasts and are listening to them for longer periods of time. So the first one is the rise of the audio influencer. Today, we are looking for people we can trust. We are now doing it not only in our texts and through blogs and vlogs. But now we're doing it through podcast as well. So watch for the rise of the audio influencer and the attractiveness they have to marketers who are trying to align their products with a specific target market. A second trend is shown by the Edelman Trust Barometer that said that people distrust brand messages. As a result, we are also seeing the rise of the brand ambassador. A brand ambassador is a person who is aligned with the brand and aligned with a specific target market that the marketer wants to develop. We will see a rise in the influencer and movement to brand ambassadors as we move forward in the digital marketplace. Gen z and Millennials really distrust unauthentic content, especially if it comes from influencers. So as a result, the third trend is In Authenticity We Trust. You need to show a human side to the marketplace, and you need to be authentic in everything you do, as well as transparent. People are looking for that, particularly, younger audiences, younger markets want to have authenticity as a central part of your business strategy. In my class, I like to use Cluetrain Manifesto which was actually published in 1999 as a guide to how to be human. You might want to take a look at that to reinforce this third trend. Micro or Nano influencers are becoming really important in your marketing strategy because they're less expensive than the influencers. They also have very tight-knit communities. So trend four is to the rise of the Micro or Nano influencer. There we will see growing throughout the '20s. Today, influencers need to track their social media impact. So Instagram in 2019 came out with Checkout, which is a metrics-driven system that allows them to say, here's the results that I could bring to a company. As you'll see, tracking is in a number of the top 10 trends identified by Edelman Research. Part of being transparent and authentic is being human. So there's a demand here for transparencies. In a business setting, if we make a mistake, if we go a wrong direction, we need to tell people clearly what's going to happen and what we're doing to alleviate the problem. So transparency is a very central part of your marketing mix if you want to succeed and be authentic to your target market. One important component in my digital marketing class is the concept of amplification. What that is, is being able to put out a piece of content and have a lot of people pick that up and talk about it, which amplifies your message out into the marketplace. In 2020, companies are looking at paid amplification as a way to ensure that this happens, and we see this trend growing as we go through the '20s. Essentially, it's allowing you to buy amplification and get your message out to the target market that you want to target. One of the central points of integrated marketing communication is the concept of being able to track all of your marketing activities through to the return on investment that it provides. Ninety-three percent of all marketers are using influencers, but now there's really a push to say, we need to be able to measure your influence and what you're saying all the way through to the first sale. This metrics-driven marketing will impact influencers and brand ambassadors. Privacy is becoming a more and more critical component that you need to address in your marketing programs. People want to know why you're collecting the data, what you're doing with it, and who you're sharing it with, and they demand control over that data. We need to keep up with privacy legislation and privacy discussions and keep your company on the forefront of what's happening in terms of consumer privacy today. Gen Z is a huge market. They account for 40 percent of the entire buying market in the United States today. You need to think about what are the unique needs of the Gen Z marketplace and how they want to build a relationship with you. Brand ambassadors, influencers are just a component of the way that they want to do business as well as being transparent and authentic. So we need to begin to align with the Gen Z marketplace in order to succeed. So those are the top 10 trends identified by Edelman Research, and they're trends that you need to keep up with in the '20s.
