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Guiding you through the ever changing world of communications
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2011 saw a plethora of changes to consumer buying habits and a multitude of new communications platforms blossom, offering us more opportunities than ever to creatively engage with our audiences.
The year ahead will be no different, and we curious folk at Finn have taken the liberty to look ahead and pull together the must-know trends. In this edition of Beacon, we look at the hottest technologies, the latest consumer quirks and give you a slice of insight about the campaigns, tools and news that have turned us on this year.
Beacon Guiding you through the ever changing world of communications
2012 Trends
Mood Food
Food can make us happy, energised or even make us more passionate in the bed-room, but it doesn’t stop there. New developments in science are revealing that everything we eat has the potential to change the way we think and feel. Next gen-eration foods will be tailored to meet the needs and the desires of an individual con-sumer, whether they want to be woken up, cheered up or chilled out. According to online food resource Food & Drink Towers, 44 per cent of in-dustry experts believe mood foods will increase in market value, with happiness and stress foods expected to be the main areas of growth.
Health & Wellbeing
Health and wellness has long since been a driving factor on food innovation and research by Deloitte found that 77 per cent of top manufacturers, re-tailers and food service pro-viders thought it would be the primary trend shaping our pal-ettes in 2012. More than half of shoppers are likely to read the food label before buying a product, so expect more active promotion of health benefits on shelf. The quest for ‘five portions a day’ is alive and kicking and remains the message that resonates most strongly with consumers. This, coupled with tough new reg-ulations, especially on child-hood diets, means that health will continue to be top of the consumer agenda this year.
The World’s Local Larder
The UK is one of the more gastronomically adventurous nations, and this year will be no exception, with Peruvian cuisine likely to hit the main-stream. However, when we’re not chowing down on Cevi-che, we’re likely to be going local in an attempt to reduce our environmental footprint, with authenticity, provenance and localness being the most important factors influencing food choice. Leatherhead Food Research, a global food research company, actually predicts a blending of these two trends, with consumers demanding internationally lo-cal ingredients. A food’s origin will increasingly become a mark of quality, so expect to see the likes of Madagascan vanilla become popular.
Functional Food
Functional food, those that come with added health claims, will increasingly line our grocery shelves in 2012. Why? It’s an age thing. The ag-ing Baby Boomer generation, who form the largest group of influencers in the food sector, will take an active interest in maintaining a healthy, active lifestyle as they hit retirement. We can expect to spot more products with glucosamine to help strengthen joints and omega-3 to improve brain health and help reduce heart disease.
Food
Real-Time Consumer Data
2012 will be the year that real-time online decision-making comes of age. People are increasingly sharing every-thing they do, buy, watch, lis-ten to and read, in real time, whether that’s through Twit-ter, Tumblr or social apps on Facebook (think Spotify and The Guardian). For business-es, this means a big opportu-nity to align themselves more closely with the needs of their customers. The challenge for marketeers is to make sense of this data mass and use it to make quick, smart business decisions, identifying and pre-dicting upcoming trends to capitalise on them.
CSR
Ethical business is now ex-pected and consumers are increasingly looking for com-munity benefits when mak-ing purchasing decisions. The Food & Drinks sector is one of the most scrutinised indus-tries, and it’s brands that of-fer that feel-good factor that seem to be leading the way. Take Innocent for example, who’s whole business strategy is built around sustainability and fairness - sustainable nu-trition, ingredients, packaging, production and profit shar-ing. However, it doesn’t stop at food and drink; those that go beyond simple ethical claims generally outperform their peers. Last year’s World’s Most Ethical awards honourees generated on average 30 per cent greater returns than other publically owned companies.
Corporate Volunteerism
The value that volunteering adds to the UK economy is in excess of £21.5billion and increasingly, businesses are playing a vital part as it be-comes more central to the CSR mix. Despite the financial climate, volunteerism, particu-larly stemming from business initiatives is on the up and it’s increasingly done on a na-tional scale. This year, spend-ing cuts within charities, the government’s Big Society vi-sion and the 2012 London Olympics, a huge undertaking that will require up to 70,000 volunteers, are all likely to give the sector a boost.
Random Acts of Kindness
Increasingly open communi-cations between brands and consumers mean it’s simple to surprise and delight your fans with a relevant gesture to brighten their day, help them celebrate or thank them for their opinion. Social media has prompted a lot of free brand-to-fan love, but the power behind RAK is in its se-lectivity. Last year, one of the most talked about brands was Interflora, who scoured the internet for those having a bad day and offered to send them a bunch of flowers. How-ever, the prediction for 2012 is that campaigns will have to become more complex and personalised in order to pro-vide that level of cut-through and talkability.
Corporate
Super Premium
Despite ever tightening pock-ets, UK food lovers still like to treat themselves with posh nosh from time to time. This year will see a divergence in food purchasing habits, with consumers looking to the ex-tremes of both discount and super-premium products, with centre ground brands feeling the squeeze. A premium treat can be justified as an afforda-ble indulgence, particularly if it includes a feel-good health benefit and we’re likely to see this trend extend to 2012 and beyond. And If you don’t be-lieve us, you may want to note the success of Heston’s pre-mium Christmas pud that flew off Waitrose’s shelves over the festive period.
Social Commerce
Social Commerce is about consumers using peer rec-ommendations to make pur-chases through social me-dia, whether these be ratings, reviews or comments. For brands, it means harnessing the power of word of mouth to drive purchases and includes everything from group buy-ing and check-in rewards on Foursquare, to selling limited edition products through a Fa-cebook shop. 2011 saw some of the more daring brands ex-periment with social selling, such as Starbucks and ASOS, but as user recommendations and reviews increase their in-fluence on consumer behav-iour, social commerce will stop being a “nice to have” and will start to fuel sales volumes on a par with traditional channels.
DIY Health
Who needs professional health advice when there’s an app for that? Do it Yourself Health will naturally be driven by technology in 2012, with novel apps and quirky de-vices increasingly letting con-sumers track, manage and im-prove their health themselves. Apple’s App Store currently of-fers 9,000 mobile health apps and by mid-2012, this number is expected to reach 13,000. One of our personal favourites is the Skin Scan app, which helps early identification of malignant moles.
Stay at Home Dads
This budding set of home bodies is one to watch, par-ticularly if you work in the food, beverage and FMCG sectors. Research by Aviva re-ports that there are now 1.4m stay at home dads in the UK, 10 times as many than a dec-ade ago, with one in seven fa-thers now the main childcare provider. The trend has been driven by increasing numbers of women earning more than their partners and reflects changing attitudes amongst couples, with more men able to relinquish their the role as family breadwinner and in-stead take on more work in the home.
Lifestyle
Near Field Communications
Soon every mobile device will come equipped to handle Near Field Communications (NFC), a technology that al-lows consumers to perform seamless, no-nonsense trans-actions and exchange infor-mation wirelessly. Early use of NFC has been about stream-lining the shopping experi-ence, such as a Starbucks app that allows consumers to snap up coffees through phones pre-loaded with cred-it, and a register-free eBay shop where bargain-hungry bidders snap up deals with their smart phones. However, being marketers, we’re also excited about the possibilities for NFC to be used to push deals, coupons and mes-sages to consumers’ smart phones at relevant times and locations.
Smart Phones
Up until recently sky high prices have kept the major-ity of the population out of the smart phone market but thanks to the emergence of cheaper models, penetration has more than doubled in the UK over the last two years. This year usage is predicted to reach a tipping point, with 50 per cent of consumers ex-pected to own a smart phone by the end of the year.
For marketeers, mobile was once a way to reach those in-fluencers that stayed ahead of the curve, but as mobile devices become an ever more common touch point between brands and every day consumers, there’s much more motivation for brands to invest in mobile technology and campaigns.
Open Graph
Facebook’s Open Graph is a set of programming tools that make connections between Facebook and external ob-jects on the web. On one level, it lets you take Facebook’s so-cial experience and integrate it within your website. Even more exciting is its ability to take the platform’s rich social data and turn it into a person-alised web experience. The thing to watch out for in 2012 is its addition of social actions over and above the now ubiq-uitous ‘like’, such as reading, writing and watching, that will allow more dynamic content sharing through the new Time-line profile.
Gamification
Gamification has evolved from buzzword to viable on-line strategy and it’s now be-ing tipped as one of the top tech trends for 2012. Based on the idea that rewards are cru-cial in creating an engaging digital experience, the phe-nomenon involves engaging people by applying game mechanics, for example use of level progression, leader-boards, badges and achieve-ments, in an online business environment. It all started with Foursquare’s check-in based badge system, but we’ve seen other innovative incar-nations of late, such as Sam-sung Nation, a game-based website that allows users to earn points and progress by reviewing products, watching videos and participating in user-generated Q&As.
Digital
2012 Consumer
In 2012, 23 per cent of the UK’s popula-tion will be over 60. The significance of this statistic is that the baby boomer genera-tion is reaching retirement, meaning that many of tomorrow’s pensioners will be more well informed, well educated, health conscious, and discerning than their pre-decessors. They’ll exercise twice as much as the previous generation and more will continue to work. These seniors are interested in successful ageing, extend-ing their middle years by maintaining a healthy, active lifestyle, sparking demand for products and environments that ac-commodate their changing physical and sensory capabilities.
Amongst 2012’s utopian vision of collaboration, gamification and random acts of kindness, there’s still an ever present undercurrent of austerity loom-ing large. Research shows that the number of Brit-ish shoppers that feel they have little or no spare cash has reached an all time high at 32 per cent. The average family has around £2,000 less dispos-able income than in previous years. 71 per cent have changed their shopping habits and 65 per cent of these have switched to cheaper grocery brands, an acceptable compromise that is set to continue even as financial pressure eases.
Collaborative consumption de-scribes an emerging economic model based not on ownership, but on sharing, swapping, bor-rowing and renting access to products and services. If it all sounds grubby and socialistic, it’s not. It’s set to be one of the hottest and far reaching trends of 2012 and is reinventing not just what we consume but how we consume it. We’ve already seen it permeate emerging sectors such as social lending (check out Zopa if you’re short on cash!), accommodation (with peer-to-peer travel provider CouchSurfing) and car sharing (Zipcar), and you can expect a raft of imitators in 2012.
We’ve already explored Near Field Com-munications (NFC) and it’s that very technology that’s contributing to what is fast becoming a cash-less society. It’s not that far away. We’re serious! The initial lure of this system is convenience and speed, but it will eventually open up a whole new world of payments, rewards and targeted, real time offers. We’ve followed this trend for a while and it’s been a slow burner as the technolo-gy has been gradually made affordable and available. While 2012 will not be the year that the UK adopts cashless pay-ing en masse, we’ll see big boys such as Google, Mastercard and Paypall roll out cashless initiatives worldwide.
While traditional coupons are consid-ered tired, outdated, and cumbersome, and bargain hunting was once some-thing to hide, new and innovative uses of online deals, discounts and coupons are driving a new and affluent breed of hagglers to seek out the best prices in 2012 and beyond. Consumer attitudes are shifting in a big way, and such fru-galicious behaviour is now considered smart, admirable and dare we say it, darn right cool. The lure of attractive on-line technologies touting deals will en-sure this is a big trend in 2012, with 9.2 million consumers expected to use on-line coupons throughout the year. That’s a helluva lot of savings!
The mass of data readily available on-line, particularly through social media, has driven a mega trend in personalisa-tion. Custom made, personalised goods and services are growing in popularity among consumers who desire complete-ly individualized products and services, blending creativity with purchasing pow-er. Everything from customised online ex-periences, to personalised gifts, to large, custom built creations. Early instigators this year include Toyota, which is encour-aging fans to create bespoke music vid-eos alongside their ad campaign’s pup-pet characters, and airline KLM, which is letting passengers choose who sit next to them based on their social media compatibility.
Tightening pockets and the growing influence of cookery programmes will fuel a growing interest in entertaining in the home, with consumers investing more time and effort into meal times to add fun and theatre to the ordinary working week. Original recipes and un-usual ingredients will be the focus for home-cooks in 2012, who will be influ-enced by TV, foodie magazines, web-sites, social networks and Smartphone apps.
You’ve heard about crowdsourcing, employing the collective wisdom of consumers to help de-sign products, create content or solve business problems, but democratic buying takes things one step further. It bases product design and produc-tion entirely on the votes of the crowd. Take shop-ping website Shopping Forecast as an example. It lets you view, comment, vote on and share next season’s styles, with votes on each item affecting where and in what volume the piece appears in stores.
The democratic buyer is not a passive voice amongst the throng of the bazaar, but an active contributor to the market place. Expect their voic-es to be heard loud and proud this year!
Alongside the renaissance in high quality home dining, consumers will also look to extend this pre-mium food experience outside the home. Despite anxieties over the economy, many commenta-tors suggest that where there are cutbacks elsewhere in the house-hold budget, eating out will re-main central to our lives. Dining out used to be a special occasion, but research has shown that it’s now considered a regular treat. 70 per cent of us now claim to visit a res-taurant at least once a month and the market is expected to grow six per cent to reach £36.6bn this year. Increasingly social media will lead decision making, with location-based deals, mobile couponing and group buying discounts dic-tating where people eat. Who said it was all doom and gloom?
Today’s consumer typically looks to Google before hitting the shops, a trend that has sig-nificantly contributed to the decline of the British high street. While total growth in online retailing slowed to eight per cent last year, there are now an estimated 37m regular on-line shoppers in the UK. What we also saw was massive growth amongst the under 45s who have adopted it as their primary purchasing point, a sign that internet shopping is reach-ing maturity. This year we’ll see consumers em-brace online shopping in new and innovative ways, such as through social commerce, mo-bile coupons and daily deals, which should breathe further life into the channel.
With group buying, there truly is strength in numbers. Last year, group buying took off in a big way through sites like Groupon, Living-Social and MyCityDeal, who be-gan offering huge discounts on products once a certain number of people signed up. Brands got on the bandwagon too, with cam-paigns like Innocent’s Tweet and Eat, which unlocked bigger and bigger discounts as more people tweeted a hashtag. This year, we expect much more emphasis on geo-located deals through mo-bile devices, market consolidation as consumers develop preferred group buying brands, and expan-sion into other sectors, as media providers and others get on board.
Over recent years, our ailing econ-omy has accelerated the trend for locally sourced food, as consum-ers seek to support the economy and local communities. In Decem-ber last year, over half of shoppers claimed to buy local products to support local producers, a quarter to support local retailers, and over a fifth to keep jobs in their area. Supporting British producers has now become the most important ethical concern for grocery shop-pers, with more than four in ten consumers intending to buy more locally sourced goods this year.
Forget the regular weekly shop. Rather than stocking up on all the essentials, grocery shoppers are in-creasingly hitting the stores on nar-rowly focused missions. They may be looking for a specific meal, they may have run out of something, or could just be hungry for a snack. Shopping has not completely be-come a spontaneous activity and the majority employ some form of planning beforehand, such as making a list, devising recipe so-lutions and looking for deals, but we could see a shift from category management to mission manage-ment as retailers and brands seek out ways to capitalise on the trend.
UK Social Media Landscape
Youtube
Foursquare
Flickr
UK Social Media Landscape
Things To Look Out For In 2012
Why do brands use Facebook? Generally because of its po-tential as a viral medium, its propensity to allow dialogue with consumers and increasingly, its ability to house apps that pro-vide engaging, interactive content. We’re now also seeing F-Commerce, the act of selling products through Facebook, start to take off in a big way. This year we’ve learnt that Facebook is a great place to trial exclusive or new products. Heinz sold limited edition ketch-up with balsamic vinegar through its page, creating a lot of talkability; and more recently, Magners started selling limited edition cider through its page. However, the primary goal be-hind these campaigns is to drive advocacy and conversation, rather than large sales volumes. There is mounting evidence to suggest that F-commerce is already a viable retail platform. Around 50,000 retailers have opened an F-store through the e-commerce platform Payv-ment and 75 per cent of retailers plan to use Facebook for so-cial commerce in the future. The top three brands on Facebook (Coca Cola, Starbucks and Disney) all sell directly through the medium and have reported healthy sales figures. Over 1m Star-bucks users are using the brand’s e-commerce enabled Face-book loyalty program and over 5,000 used Walmart’s group-buy Facebook app on the day of its launch. The jury is out as to whether the average consumer is ready to adopt Facebook as a mainstream buying medium and it will be up to brands to provide compelling reasons to use the medium over others in 2012.
F-Commerce
Will 2012 mark the tipping point for QR codes? They were every-where last year – on products, posters, in magazines and shops – but questions still remained about their usage and value. A study late last year found that despite their ubiquity as a market-ing tool, only a third of consumers knew what one was and how to scan one, but it’s still early days for this technology. The beauty of QR codes is that they enable brands to provide something exclusive to smart phone users with the knowledge to use them, but up until now, they have largely been used as URL alterna-tives, driving consumers to brand homepages. A novel way to drive traffic, but hardly revolutionary! However, we did start to see evidence of brands starting to use them to add real value to the consumer experience. We saw Tesco create a QR code store in a Korean subway that saved time for busy commuters; Heinz used QR codes to let Americans show their appreciation to their troops by leaving them person-alised messages; and Victoria’s Secret launched a naughty bill-board campaign with QR codes covering the modesty of nearly nude models. Phew! With smart phone usage expected to sur-pass 50 per cent of the population this year, there’s a real possi-bility that the creative use of QR codes will become a real value driver in the world of mobile marketing, so get your thinking caps on!
QR Codes
How many of you have ever Facebooked while watching X Fac-tor? Or Tweeted your opinion during Question Time? Chances are you have. In fact, 44 per cent of UK consumers say they use social networks to enhance their TV viewing. These days, the majority of prime time television shows already have their own hash-tag to group together social media discussions and many programmes, particularly faux reality shows like TOWIE, have their participants tweet during air time to engage with fans. Whilst television ownership is in decline, ratings for live en-tertainment are creeping ever higher as viewers look to watch in real-time so that they interact socially through these chan-nels. Up until recently, social media and television have been separate mediums that just happen to be complementary, but we’re now seeing the first forays into a fully immersive social TV experience, with second screen apps such as Unami and Zeebox (which you’ll learn more about later) being released for the iPad. For those with smart TVs (TVs with online technology), the possibility of having all this interaction all in one place will become a reality over the coming months and make sure to keep an eye out for Apple, as its launch of a television set this year could signal a complete reinvention of the concept.
Social TV
An homage to the old Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras, Instagram is a free app that allows users to take photos, add quick stylistic fixes like vintage hues and dream-like blurs, and then share them instantly with their social network. You’ve probably heard about it, the chances are you’ve used it or at least spotted a photo run through one of its array of filters. It was iPhone’s app of 2011, currently boasts 14 million users and before its year anniversary, a whopping 150 million photos had been uploaded. Its popularity is undisputed, but why do we think it rose to fame and why should you keep an eye on it in 2012? We put its success down to a winning combination of quality, ease of use and people’s never ending appetite for sharing their lives visually. Essentially, it gives a mass of casual photographers the ability to produce images with some sort of artistic merit with-out the need for any professional design skills, and at the click of a button, lets them share it amongst their peer groups to garner instant gratification and admiration. We think this is just the tip of a booming mobile photo sharing trend, and the increasing prevalence of high megapix-el smartphones amongst the population is only going to throw further fuel to the fire. Last year, the app made its first hint at wel-coming brands by introducing a hashtag feature for grouping content, but we wouldn’t be surprised if additional campaign-friendly features are added in 2012.
A suitably strategic topic for the boss, Rich explores the quandary of social me-dia measurement and our fixation with big numbers, whether this is reach, im-pressions, clicks or followers. In the social space, this fixation can lead to a skewed view of success, so in his post, he argues the case for digital communications to be measured for quality, depth and na-ture of engagement
http://bit.ly/bnsyndrome
Greg attended a Geo-location lunch as part of Leeds Digital Festival and that got him thinking about, you guessed it, Geo-location. He explores the past, present and future of the technology, focusing on the countless opportunities there are for brands in this space.
http://bit.ly/geofuture
James likes grandiose ideas, so it’s no surprise his topic of choice is “one idea that will change the world”. He takes a look in more detail at the trend, or rather the revolutionary movement that is Col-laborative Consumption. He muses over some of the most successful organisa-tions that are facilitating this new eco-nomic model and how all this swapping and trading is affecting us
http://bit.ly/collabconsumption
3,2,1 Share At the end of each month, we like to take the time to relax with a glass of wine and present each other the content, ideas and campaigns that have been catch-ing our attention. A show and tell of sorts, it’s rather like being back in primary school, in a good way.
3, 2, 1 Share is three slides and two min-utes on one topic area and in this final section, we’d like to give you some insight into the topics we’ve been pondering over. Below you’ll find a teaser on each Finnster’s latest loved topic and if you’re eager to find out more you can follow the QR code or URL to a blog post on our website.
Jessica illustrated the mega trend of customization by looking at two stand-out campaigns launched last year: Heinz’s Get Well Soup campaign in which the brand gave its 80k Facebook fans the chance to send personalised cans of soup to their friends; and Nivea’s Christmas campaign that allowed fans to send gift sets enveloped in wrapping paper made from their friends’ pictures.
http://bit.ly/customking
A lover of all things social, Chris drills down into the emerging world of so-cial television, exploring the recently launched free iPod app Zeebox, which works in tandem with Facebook and Twitter to let TV chatterboxes get together around programmes they are watching, and even feeds them relevant content about the people, places and products they see on screen.
http://bit.ly/zeebox
We love the idea of marrying brands with culture to create credibility. Tom spotted an innovative campaign by Volkswagen Canada called ‘The Great Volkswagen Art Heist’, which effortlessly blends art, ambient activity and social media to cre-ate truly talkable content.
http://bit.ly/artheist
Rachel explores the continuing progres-sion of digital magazines. She takes a look at a new food trade title, Encounter Magazine, and uses it as a vehicle to weigh up the pros and cons of maga-zines moving into the digital space and the opportunities for brands to gain added value in this new environment.
http://bit.ly/digimags
Always the joker, Janelle took to a clever tongue in cheek campaign from Kel-logg’s Rice Crispie Squares. Based on the idea that Rice Krispie Squares are in fact rectangular not square, the brash cam-paign catches people’s attention with outrageous lies, subverting the conven-tions of traditional advertising while pok-ing fun at the industry.
http://bit.ly/squarelies
Sophie dug up a fantastically useful iPhone app called ‘Can I Eat It’. It allows food conscious consumers to upload their dietary preferences, whether aller-gies, lifestyle choices or dislikes, and use it to check the appropriateness of prod-ucts by scanning the barcode. A genius choice for those on a January health drive!
http://bit.ly/canieatit
