Top Marketing Trends For 2023

The marketing discipline has always been intertwined with what’s happening around the world. After all, marketers’ main task is to attract and gain the attention of people. There’s no doubt that the economy will be tough next year. Many businesses are cutting their budgets, including marketing spending, to survive through.

From a macro level, the largest marketing trend will be driven by a mix of new technology, a power shift in culture, and the continued success of new platform breeds. As exciting as it sounds, the largest worries for marketers will be the effectiveness and efficiencies of their marketing resources. More than ever, marketers have to justify their spending, resulting in a tougher balance between long-term brand building and short-term commercial performance. Average marketers will go for short-term performance in order to manage up. Strong marketers will find a way to sell through entertainment, building their brands through relevance.

Understanding where technology and cultural communities are moving towards will help marketers drive relevance.

Without further ado, let’s jump into the five trends I believe are the most important to consider for marketers around the world:

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Short-form videos

The biggest breakthrough platform in 2023 has to be TikTok. We have all heard about the TikTok-fication of social media. Suddenly, whom you follow and how your profile page looks matter less. The platform recommends content you may like based on your interests and viewing habits, less so on whom you follow. From text to images and to videos, the medium used online is evolving. Partly thanks to better connectivity and smartphone technology, people (consumers) can now easily produce their own videos. So they talk to one another via videos. They search for videos, consume news and learn via videos. Almost all platforms are embracing short-form vertical videos now; think YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and even LinkedIn posts! Short-form vertical videos are becoming the mainstream medium, and a format unavoidable for any marketers, including B2B.

Culture marketing

Brands and media conglomerates used to have the absolute power to shape pop culture. This power is waning. With TikTok and the low barrier to short-form video production (see above), people (consumers) are driving culture together. They now have a voice; a stronger voice than brands and publishers. They are forming their own communities and bringing their niche interests to the mainstream. Fans are altering the idol worship experience, and even investing in their favorite artists through NFTs. The internet brings people of niche interests together across the world. Platforms provide a public space for their interests to manifest, allowing people to bounce ideas and create their own culture. So if culture is now shaped by people (consumers), how can brands continue to drive culture the way they used to? They have to add real value in order to participate in the cultural communities. The bar set to change culture is higher than ever.

Globalized media & diversity

In the last decade, we saw how the Korean wave “Hallyu” has taken the global stage, with BTS, Oscars winning film “Parasite”, and so much more. Even the top most-watched TV series on Netflix series is Korean (Squid Game), and the 4th is Spanish (Money Heist)! Audiences around the world have a growing appetite for regional content. I believe that the consumption of non-English content is heavily supported by the development of subtitling too. In the future, subtitling and dubbing will become even more efficient and of higher quality with the help of AI.

English and western media won’t stay as the monopoly, or top choice anymore. The entertainment industry knows it and has been investing in regional content. Brands and marketers? We need to look even more into regional instead of global production to keep up too.

Generative AI content

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been all the rage these days. AI chatbots and content generators are nothing new, and ChatGPT has hit mainstream headlines for all AI-generated content. We are seeing AIs everywhere: they are helping to check our grammar, write content, create art, and enhance our videos through filters and backgrounds. It seems like even with the information explosion, we can’t get enough content!

I don’t think that AIs are here to take over our jobs. In fact, they will help us to plan and execute faster. And the largest potential for AIs in marketing is personalization. AI can help tailor content to suit different needs.

However, if we are all served personalized content based on what we enjoy (or are likely to enjoy), we will all be living in our own individualized reality, creating our own bubbles. To counter this perspective, I now believe that there are still merits to curated content, like magazines.

Digital collectibles (NFT)

Non-fungible tokens (NFT) have seen bull and bear markets all within the same year in 2022. NFT collectors are familiar with how NFT collections can act as a Kickstarter, a collectible, or a contract for co-ownership. It’s really hard to win in the space; Opensea alone has over 85 million collections, so how many will survive?

On the other hand, mainstream platforms are still continuing their support for NFTs. Shopify has been developing support for selling NFTs directly through Shopify. Instagram is also building capabilities to allow users to mint and sell NFTs. Until NFTs hit the mainstream market, growth will be challenging. In my opinion, it is inevitable that the NFTs have to drop their name “NFT”, since it comes with the stigma of the crypto scare amongst the public. Repositioning as “Digital collectibles” for most NFTs will be a better way forward since they are mostly digital products.

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Overall, we continue to see the trend of power shift from brands to people next year. Interest and taste are becoming more fragmented than ever, and the toughest game for brands and marketers is to continue staying relevant while keeping their budgets low. The good news is that with technology and the power of fans, it will still be possible for marketers to maintain cost efficiency, as long as they don’t let their brand communities down.

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Note: Opinions shared here are my own and not the views of my awesome employer.

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