The Futurist: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

I hate making predictions. The yearly budget and planning process is as close to crystal ball gazing as I really like to get. Other than the fact there are plenty of futurists around who get paid for this sort of thing, I worry that someone will actually pay some attention to what I’ve said and point out how far off I was.However, Marketing magazine can be persuasive about these things! So, in the hope the article will be followed by some sort of Men in Black forced amnesia technology – allow me to offer up some thoughts.Selfish one first – digital transformation. Taking on the new role here at StarHub puts it directly on the radar for me. However, I see an increasing amount of agencies – not just social/digital, but traditional ones – positioning themselves as having experience of digital transformation.Given the far-reaching organisation-wide implications around DT, and the fact it’s still a nascent area for a majority of companies, I’m somewhat surprised that many agencies can claim to have genuine depth of experience.Having said that, it does make sense for agencies to develop their offering in this area. If a key benefi t of DT is to support the company goal of differentiating themselves through excellence in customer experience then there is an obvious connection to the brand. And if it’s an agency involved with theclient’s brand expect to see digital transformation referenced more in its credentials or better still an outline of its approach and how it can help brands implement it across the org.Next up, and this is more evolution than revolution, is the increase on social commerce and social selling. Last year saw most brands move away from simply trying to build up their social communities and report back on vanity metrics. With the C-suite no longer obsessed with driving up higher likes on the company Facebook page then the inevitable and somewhat overdue question of, “so where is the ROI on our social media?”, is now being asked more in the boardroom.Brands will be looking far more into how they can use LinkedIn, for example, to support their sales teams in lead generation and business development, so expect to see a lot of your colleagues’ profiles looking more “complete”.How do you drive to your dot.com will become one of the first questions you’ll have to answer in considering your use of the various social networking service.Which could mean that you leverage certain platforms such as Instagram more than you did previously. At Lenovo I was always asked why I got asked more questions around the numbers I was presenting on global calls than any of the other function leaders and I think it came down to two reasons.One, we had more metrics in social than most of the other teams and, two, nobody believed any of them. So I personally welcomed the opportunity to expand on how we viewed the value of social and to associate more of what it delivers to lead generation and sales. The third horse I’m backing is an increase in brands as content producers. Nothing new for brands to develop content, but I think we’ll seemore in-house editors with their own editorial teams, more video producers, curators, moderators and creative leads. It will become far more organised and systematic than simply throwing something to the PR team to write a press release.It will be focused around real-time marketing powered by social listening and customer insights. Some of the big brands are already there – Coke with Content 2020 and adidas’ approach at the last World Cup – but I don’t see it just being exclusive to global brands. My sense is it won’t be driven by the opinion that agencies are no longer being relevant, but rather clients wanting to get the message out faster and have it come from the “heart” of the company.And there you have it, my three picks for where marketing is going – feel free to look back on it in 12 months to see if it was all nonsense. Cue Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in wraparound shades and black suits.The writer Rod Strother is VP, digital transformation, StarHubThis article was first published in Marketing Magazine Singapore’s Jan-Feb 2016 print edition. To read more views from senior marketers click here.