Marketers must adapt with digital consumer behavior in order to succeed.
The changing landscape of digital marketing continues to impact high-end home brands, and marketers must evolve and adapt in order to succeed. A recent report from comScore underscores this trend, and offers some interesting insight into some of the seismic shifts marketers now face.
The report, titled U.S. Digital Future in Focus, covers “the profound changes in digital consumer behavior across a variety of sectors, including mobile, social media, video, advertising, search and e-commerce. The incredible evolution occurring in the marketplace today is the result of several transformative shifts.”
While the data is generally focused on U.S. consumers and the businesses that serve them, I think comScore’s transformative shifts have significant implications for high-end home brands:
1. Platform Shifts
In retrospect, digital media used to be easy. You built a website for your brand, which for high-end home brands, typically only required a rich brand experience for consumers. And that experience was delivered via the desktop. No longer. Mobile has overtaken the desktop through new digital platforms for smartphones and tablets. We will continue to see consumers engage with digital media across more and more platforms, creating a new kind of media fragmentation that makes 500 cable channels look simplistic.
2. Content Shifts
As consumers shift media platforms from traditional to digital, the way they consume content evolves, as does the way they create content. Think of it this way: those billion smartphones out there are not only “receivers,” but “transmitters,” too. Marketers must build upon their strategy for creating and distributing content to account for this more complex ecosystem.
3. Demographic Shifts
comScore points out that young people “play a critical role in leading shifts in consumer technology adoption and usage habits.” By studying the behavior of these future consumers of high-end home brands, marketers can fortunately get a preview of what’s soon to come.
4. Marketing Shifts
You may recall the slides made popular by forecaster Mary Meeker, who documented the gap between time versus ad dollars spent by medium. The good news is marketers have gotten smarter – and ad dollars are more closely following eyeballs to digital and mobile platforms. Analytics continue to improve, which drives down waste and improves optimization. Look for continued pressure to generate (and document) ROI.
By evaluating your marketing strategy through the lens of these four transformative shifts, you may find inspiration to dial-up or dial-down some of your strategies and tactics.
To download a copy of the comScore report, click here.
