Top 10 Marketing and Business Trends in 2023

As the economic environment changes, the investment and defense lines of enterprises in marketing will naturally change. Overall, 2023 may be a year of great changes in marketing business. The author of the following article has sorted out the marketing business trends in 2023, let's take a look.

The year 2022 that has just passed was obviously not an easy year, and this can be seen from almost every angle and event.

From regional disputes to an energy crisis that spread across Europe, more and more countries began to fall into the quagmire of inflation. As a result, permacrisis, or persistent crisis, topped the list of the most searched words of the year in the British Collins Dictionary. Recession seemed to have become the mainstream word in the entire Western world.

Will things get better in 2023?

The forecasts given by many authoritative organizations are not optimistic. According to the IMF's forecast, the global economic growth rate in 2023 will be 2.7%, and at least one-third of countries will fall into recession. International investment banks such as Goldman Sachs predict that the global economic growth rate will slow down to below 2% in 2023.

Of course, the news is not all negative. According to Goldman Sachs' forecast, China's GDP will grow by 4.5% in 2023. KPMG believes that China is expected to achieve 5.2% growth in 2023. Compared with the pessimism in the West, this is indeed an encouraging signal.

Therefore, as the economic environment changes, the investment and defense of enterprises in marketing will naturally change. Overall, 2023 may be a year of great changes in marketing business. Therefore, Morketing has compiled the top 10 marketing business trends in 2023 to provide you with as much inspiration as possible.

1. New consumer brands are no longer marketing conscious

When it comes to the various new concepts and trends that have emerged in recent years, new consumption is almost a term that cannot be ignored. Since the beginning of 2020, new consumer brands have been moving forward like a rocket. This super-high growth rate that cannot be ignored and the expected huge market size have created an extremely hot new consumer investment and financing market.

As a result, more and more new players began to join the ranks of new consumption. Looking back at 2020, according to Tmall's official data, 357 new brands won the sales crown in subdivided categories. Half a year later, in the 2021 Tmall 618, 459 subdivided fields TOP1 appeared again. It seems to be getting easier for new brands to go from 0 to 1. But behind the temporary highlight, there are more new brands that are declining. A leading platform once gave such a number that the survival rate of new brands is less than 50% one year after their establishment, and less than 20% of brands are still alive three years later.

At the same time, the reputation of new consumer brands began to polarize, but whether good or bad, new consumer brands at the time seemed to have always been strongly bound to a keyword - traffic .

In fact, in the new consumption track, the initially very common marketing model was to attract the attention of consumers in niche areas by promoting concepts, and then find these consumers through the advantages of strong positioning of digital advertising, deliver advertisements to them accurately and ultimately achieve conversions.

This is also why many new consumer brands have strong Internet attributes at the beginning - spending money to gain users, using rapidly growing user data to convince investors, continuing to spend money to gain a larger number of users, introducing a new round of investment, and constantly replicating this path, and finally starting to try to expand into other fields after reaching the peak in a niche market.

The brands that first joined this track did reap enough dividends through this strategy and achieved rapid development and growth. So far, the "explosive product strategy" has almost become the core strategy for many new consumer brands to survive.

Three years have passed since the new consumption boom. Many of the new consumption brands that were popular at the time seem to have finally hit their "rookie wall" (the so-called rookie wall refers to the fact that rookies who have just joined the NBA often perform outstandingly, but as time goes by, their opponents gradually figure out their playing style, and there will inevitably be a period of decline). The giants have also focused more energy on new consumption brands, and the marketing methods that have worked in the past have even become a poison that only works for a short period of time.

Just like the point that a new consumer brand CMO mentioned accidentally in a conversation with Morketing: "Many new consumer brands spend too much time, energy and money on marketing, but some marketing content not only fails to impress consumers, but even makes consumers feel that the brand has spent all its budget on marketing and has not put in the effort to polish the product, and eventually becomes a brand with a strong sense of marketing."

In fact, by the end of 2022, Morketing heard similar thoughts when communicating with many new brands. This year, rationality , pragmatism and caution are the general attitudes of new consumer CXOs.

Of course, removing the marketing sense does not mean not doing marketing, but doing marketing in a more subtle and gentle way. If we want to change the most common saying, new consumer brands need to establish a longer-term and close relationship with users. Those new consumer brands that relied on hot products and effective advertising strategies and were once popular but are now called stock price poison have proved that the past model is not feasible.

When capital and popularity are gone, star creation will no longer continue, and you can only rely on yourself. Brands must build their own core capabilities, whether it is product strength, organizational strength, or precipitable brand assets. Just like Babycare Chief Brand Officer Iris said, "In marketing, I have always believed that the money spent is divided into two parts. The money that can be precipitated is investment, and the rest is expenses."

2. Building a brand content team

As mentioned above, removing the sense of marketing never means not marketing. But if you want to complete a marketing campaign without leaving any trace, or to establish a long-term relationship with consumers, creating content that can impress consumers and empathize with them becomes the key to the next step.

"In the future, 90% of brand companies will be content companies." This is the view mentioned by Guanxia co-founder Shen Li in a public interview.

As more and more information becomes available, there are more and more internet celebrities, bloggers, and content producers of all kinds, and the information consumers obtain and their level of pickyness about information are also increasing.

Consumers may feel uneasy when they see a brand’s huge marketing expenses in a blogger’s video content, but they may also develop a strong connection with the brand because of some touching content.

But it is undeniable that diversified media channels are essentially two sides of the same coin. On the positive side, there are more and more channels for brands and consumers to come into contact, and consumers' ability to obtain information is naturally getting stronger. But on the negative side, it also means that consumers who are bombarded with saturated information every day are increasingly pursuing content quality.

If we push forward 20 years, young people who are extremely bored in the toilet may read every little word on the shampoo word by word, but now mobile phones fill almost every minute of users' lives, and the large amount of information makes it difficult for consumers to spend time on content they are not interested in. Therefore, in addition to product power and channel power, today's brands are increasingly pursuing the maximization of "content power", using content to strengthen the brand's "meaningful" and "differentiated" image in the minds of consumers.

In this regard, we have seen many new consumer brands begin to try various new forms of content marketing, the most common of which are publications and magazines. For example, Babycare and users co-created the parent-child inspiration reading "Babycare Life", Sandunban launched "Coffee, Neighborhoods and Dialogues" in September, Yongpu Coffee is also not far behind, with the monthly "Islander Monthly", and Guanxia launched "Kunlun KUNLUN" for the first time at the end of September.

In addition to publications, audio content has also attracted much attention from brands, and the "little tricks" they use to attract users through " audio content " are becoming more and more diverse.

Take San Dun Ban, for example, which has attached great importance to content presentation and accumulation since the beginning of its brand establishment. It regards podcasts as an important way to build brand content. Last year, it launched a Chinese podcast program "Flying Radio" focusing on coffee and lifestyle. While recording the other side of coffee lovers, it tells the brand story in a subtle way.

Chinese jewelry brand "YIN" also launched its independent podcast column "A Little Addicted" at the end of February this year. It is updated once a month and mainly talks about life. Although it is no longer the main presentation of products, this independent podcast is still very important to "YIN". After all, the density of communication with users directly determines the intensity of the brand's ability to penetrate into users' lives.

Frankly speaking, no one likes advertising, but everyone dislikes good stories and content. For brands, whether it is audio blogs or various magazines, the essence is to extend the tentacles into the lives of users. We can even think that whether it is to get rid of the marketing sense or to build a better content team, the essence is similar - from promoting products in the past to building a deeper emotional way.

Looking further, the era is inevitably moving from the text era to the visual era. As the base of media such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu becomes larger and larger, the speed of the Internet is getting faster and faster.

The way people get information is changing subtly. When TikTok first emerged, many senior industry practitioners said: "TikTok's biggest and most direct competitor is actually Baidu, because TikTok is changing the way information is distributed."

We have seen this trend become increasingly evident over the years. The way people obtain information has undergone a radical change, with more and more people starting to search on visual social media rather than text-based search engines.

After all, visual search is fast, convenient, and intuitive. For example, when searching for how to cook a dish, the efficiency of searching for short videos on Xiaohongshu and Douyin is much higher than the efficiency of searching for text on search engines. At the same time, when searching for the products and store recommendations you want, the results obtained through visual search have great advantages. Google's own internal research shows that 40% of young people will go to TikTok or Instagram first when looking for a place to have lunch, rather than Google Maps or search.

In general, these changes all require brands to have a more efficient and capable content team. On the one hand, with more and more content channels, more efficient content production capabilities are naturally needed. On the other hand, it is not easy to establish effective links with consumers in terms of content, and it may even backfire.

Take Babycare, a topic that once topped the hot search list this year, as an example. For a long time, advertisements of some maternal and child brands may be filled with floor-to-ceiling windows, large lawns, bright and tidy rooms, clean and cute babies, and happy young parents. The angles of everyone’s smile in the picture are perfect.

The Babycare content team returned to telling the truth about parenting life and those imperfect B-sides. When these B-sides are restored and users can empathize with them, it is more healing for them. For example, this case of "mother's love does not need pain to prove" is also a two-way rush to "restore the B-side".

Throughout the entire process, what consumers ultimately saw was only one top trending search. Behind this trending search was a survey jointly organized by Babycare, doctors, and the Zhejiang Women and Children's Foundation, which provided a true understanding of the emotional demands of the target user group and consistent empathy.

In fact, there are many such examples, such as SK-II’s “She Finally Went to the Blind Date Corner” many years ago, an advertisement with only its logo revealed at the end of the film, which brought SK-II nearly 50% sales growth that year.

As Iri of Babycare said in an interview with Morketing, "At the brand level, we feel that emotion is not a one-way output, it is a two-way relationship. Only in this way can we establish a closer connection."

3. Continuous and refined operations

If you think about it carefully, it is not difficult to find that whether it is to get rid of the marketing feeling or to impress users subtly with content, the core still revolves around two points.

1. Reduce costs and increase efficiency in the current market environment in order to guard against possible black swan events in the future.
2. As the times change, users have once again become the core C position. Therefore, creating a better experience for users has become the key to brand success.

Therefore, refined operations naturally become the next focus that brands should pay close attention to.

Looking back 10 years ago, when the Internet era was just beginning, there were pop-ups and plug-ins everywhere. As a complete "seller's market", the user experience of the Internet at that time could be said to be extremely bad. Most consumers who have experienced that era probably still have a deep impression of various rogue software.

But as time went on, users saw the rapid rise of countless products that took advantage of the bonus period. As the market became more crowded, the traffic bonus gradually disappeared, and a crazy, legendary traffic era finally ended in a hurry.

What's more, by 2022, most brands have realized that traffic is becoming more and more expensive, and extensive investment is no longer suitable for this era. As the products themselves become more and more popular, the industry competition pressure is increasing, and the demand for product innovation is stronger. Coupled with the increasing degree of user segmentation, diversified consumer groups have generated diversified needs. Only by deeply understanding these users can we create products and marketing that meet their needs.

Under the combined influence of these factors, coupled with the gradual maturity of various technologies, the demand for refined operations is naturally becoming more and more urgent.

Going further, as mentioned at the beginning of the article, the economic environment of the entire market is not optimistic. Although major institutions still maintain a relatively optimistic view of China's market environment, it is undeniable that 2023 is more like a year of structural adjustment. Therefore, for the vast majority of consumers, their consumption will tend to be more conservative.

As a result, the main theme of marketing in 2023 will not be expansion, but contraction and stabilization. In addition, as private domain traffic matures, according to some industry practitioners, 80% of the client's marketing budget used to be advertising, but now it has become 60% advertising or media, and 40% for other things, such as private domain.

Therefore, as the importance of private domains gradually increases in the business process, companies have begun to try to connect public and private domain data through various means. The foundation for refined operations has been further strengthened, and the importance of refined operations has naturally been further enhanced.

4. Consume prudently and consume necessities

For many brands, the first change to be made in 2023 may be completely opposite to the direction they have been working towards in the past few years.

Whether it is a new consumer brand born with the halo of consumption upgrade, or a classic brand that has been considering brand upgrades over the past few years. Over the past many years, brands have spent a lot of time and energy thinking about how to improve brand tone through product research and development, packaging, marketing and other means, and ultimately increase prices.

At that time, the rapid economic development brought about the emergence of a large number of "new middle-class" people, who had a relatively high pursuit of quality of life and were willing to pay for their hobbies and specific needs. Very similar to this, the United States also went through a very similar stage at that time, that is, relying on consumption to show off.

American sociologist Wright Mills once studied this behavior seriously and believed that the source of this behavior was the strong anxiety and self-denial within the rapidly rising middle class, and the need to strengthen their middle-class identity and ultimately alleviate this anxiety through behaviors such as consumption.

These two points naturally became the key factors for many new consumer brands that were not cheap in the early days to rise rapidly by relying on one or several specific concepts. In addition, these factors also played a unique role in the rise of various Internet celebrity events such as Internet celebrity sports and tea-making around the fire in recent years.

However, with the global economic downturn, the rising cost of living caused by inflation, stagnant wages, and even the impact of the layoff crisis, most consumers have begun to re-examine their real needs in their daily purchasing decisions. And because they are more conservative in thinking about the future, it will naturally have a certain impact on the mentality of consumers.

Therefore, weighing a series of factors such as budget, quality, convenience and health has naturally become the most natural habit for consumers. Although consumers have become more cautious about their budgets due to consumption upgrades in the past few years, their requirements for product quality have not decreased much.

Innova market insight research data also shows that in the past 12 months, consumers have become more cost-conscious, and the factor people pay most attention to when buying food and beverages is price increases.

The reason behind the ice cream assassin incident that suddenly became a hot topic this year is that consumers are beginning to pay more attention to the amount of money they spend. The same is true in the cosmetics field. In the years when many new consumer brands just emerged, consumers' comments on many brands were mostly very cost-effective, but since last year, there have been more and more comments about the same products being too expensive.

In fact, it is not that brands raise prices after certain products become popular. The prices of these products have hardly increased significantly. The key to the polarization of comments lies in the fact that in the past consumers often only compared the unit prices of several different products, but by last year, consumers' comparisons had gradually been refined to the difference in price per gram of a single product.

Although this price comparison method is not necessarily correct, it cannot be ignored that consumers’ sensitivity to prices is indeed increasing.

From another perspective, if we look back at the brands that exist in Japan and the United States today, we can easily find that Japanese brands that are famous for their cost-effectiveness, such as MUJI, UNIQLO and other brands, almost all of them rose during the most depressed days of Japan's economy.

Similarly, the most powerful weapon of Procter & Gamble, the largest daily chemical giant in the United States, has always been not only its extremely mature and powerful marketing system, but also its cost-effectiveness, which is an important factor that cannot be ignored.

Of course, this does not mean that price becomes the ultimate factor in determining the success or failure of a product. As mentioned above, consumers are always concerned about cost-effectiveness. Although consumers are very sensitive to budget, this does not mean that they are willing to tolerate low-quality products for the sake of low prices.

Whether it is MUJI, UNIQLO or a large number of affordable brands under P&G, we can find a very similar key point - in the minds of many consumers, these brands mean the best quality at the same price.

Generally speaking, if a product is of good quality and not expensive, it will definitely be loved by consumers. If a product is of good quality but a little more expensive, it can also win the market. For example, the reason why many consumers buy Apple phones is also very simple: "Many Android phones will become slow after one year of use, but Apple phones can be used for 3 to 4 years without any problems."

5. Brands return to the battle of the mind

So, a new question arises: when consumers begin to be more inclined to pay for value for money, is brand advertising still valuable?

In fact, as mentioned above, the product with the best quality at the same price range in the minds of consumers is itself a kind of mental construction.

To go further, as Jiang Nanchun, the founder of Focus Media, who has been fighting in the marketing industry for 30 years, said, "In 2023, the budget for brand advertising and traffic advertising should be 50:50. We must adhere to long-termism and believe in the power of brands." This sentence essentially shows that, at some level, "traffic advertising" is defense and "brand advertising" is advancement.

Simply put, brands aim for precise traffic, keep an eye on results, and maintain their business base, but it is difficult to maintain growth in the long run, after all, traffic is becoming more and more expensive. The key to "brand advertising" is to penetrate "user minds and establish a strong trust relationship", and repeatedly emphasize one thing (brand value) in different ways. It seems that it cannot be converted in the first time, but in the long run, the brand may inadvertently become the "first choice" of consumers in a certain category. This value is actually "progress" and is effective in the long run.

As the old story goes, during the Great Depression, even though times were tougher than they are today, brands that didn’t cut budgets saw their market share rise by nearly 20% after the economy recovered compared to brands that cut budgets across the board, even though their market shares were nearly identical before that.

The gene of an enterprise is expansion, whether it is short-term expansion or long-term growth. When IBM was "ravaged" by Japanese microprocessor companies and its market share collapsed, the company also considered splitting up the team to follow the "small and beautiful" business trend at the time, but Lou Gerstner believed that the small businesses I have seen are all thinking about how to grow bigger, and not doing the opposite.

Therefore, IBM, the elephant dancing, finally completed its own comeback. Moreover, in addition to the external environment, the internal expansion of the enterprise is also needed to enhance the enthusiasm, that is, to give everyone a goal to strive for.

What can support this expansion is precisely the occupation of consumers' minds. In today's user-centric era, people have seen too many brands that have risen by relying on dividends such as platforms, traffic, and channels. However, as the dividends decline or resources shift to other stronger brands, these brands that failed to occupy a place in the hearts of users almost all eventually ended up buried in the collapsed building.

In addition, whether it is the popular grass-planting, live streaming, private domain users, or fan economy in 2022, new brands and traditional brands are following up quickly, new strategies are becoming standard, and the benefits of omni-channel content marketing and live streaming are disappearing and entering the "platform period". Brands also need to shift from focusing on "sales" channels to brand value, and ultimately try to shape the brand into a representative that dominates a category.

In fact, the four key trends mentioned above, whether it is removing the sense of marketing, building a strong content team or continuous refined operations, are all working towards the same goal - occupying the minds of users.

In general, as the market traffic dividend has peaked in recent years, more and more companies have realized that performance advertising can no longer easily influence the results of market competition, the influence of brand communication on user minds is gradually becoming more prominent, and long-term brand building investment has once again returned to the attention of companies.

Based on this, in 2023, we may see more and more companies begin to rethink brand building and adjust their marketing investment structure, exploring how to build long-term competitiveness through high-quality brand communication based on reasonable cost investment, thereby achieving sustainable long-term operations.

6. Metaverse Marketing Begins to Enter Deep Waters

In fact, when it comes to content marketing, the Metaverse can hardly be ignored. Since Mark Zuckerberg went all in on the Metaverse, VR has become very popular. Since 2021, VR has been valued by major Internet giants, and they have invested heavily in it.

In addition, we have indeed seen many very attractive cases in 2021. Especially after Liu Yexi gained 1 million followers overnight, many companies seemed to have seen the appeal of virtual characters. In just one year, a number of giants including L'Oreal and Procter & Gamble almost all launched their own virtual characters. On the service provider side, large service providers represented by Blue Label have also begun to enter this field.

But obviously, the actual situation is not as optimistic as everyone imagined, and the development of the VR industry has even stagnated. First, Meta's market value began to evaporate by nearly 70% in 2022 due to multiple reasons. Then it was revealed that its major VR equipment OEM manufacturers cut orders by nearly 70%. The sales of VR equipment on the consumer side obviously did not meet expectations.

This means that the market education level of VR is far from qualified, whether in terms of application or equipment hardware. In fact, to some extent, VR has been a relatively niche and geeky product for nearly 7 years since various commercial-grade hardware was launched in 2015, rather than a common mass electronic consumer product.

Therefore, the current domestic market's metaverse marketing system is mainly based on the following three contents: virtual digital people, digital collections, and the most basic metaverse experience applications.

But no matter which of the above is facing an ultimate problem, as a concept, the metaverse is undoubtedly very attractive, but two years have passed since the concept was established, hyped, seriously considered, and attempted initial commercialization.

Especially after Liu Yexi and Asoul, there has been no phenomenal virtual character in the marketing circle again, and these virtual characters also have little ability to continuously attract public attention.

In this case, it will be difficult to continue to rely on the superficial concept of the Metaverse for hype or marketing in 2023. On the contrary, how to apply the Metaverse in actual scenarios and ultimately generate actual value will likely be the focus of Metaverse marketing. At the same time, companies should also realize that if they only have a virtual character or IP but cannot produce highly attractive content, this character or IP will most likely become an illusory bubble.

Or to put it more simply, when it comes to virtual characters or IP, companies should realize that using them as a lever to get big returns with small investments will be an almost impossible task in 2023.

7. More demand for digital talent

As companies begin to face issues including macroeconomics, growth pressure and coping with uncertainty, more and more CFOs and CEOs are beginning to focus their investments on "how to improve performance growth", and the solution seems to be right in front of them - digitalization.

As time goes by, the penetration rate of digitalization is getting higher and higher. In the past, brands could use digitalization or native digital and data capabilities as a tool to overtake others, but now digitalization is obviously a basic capability for most companies, especially large companies.

Even in 2022, more and more brands are no longer satisfied with digitalization and have begun to further raise their requirements. So we have seen a change from digital transformation to digital intelligence transformation, but it is undeniable that digitalization is indeed the strongest topic in the Chinese business world in the past three years.

The end result is that in the past two years, a large amount of digitalization has been launched hastily or even blindly, and a large amount of budget has been used to build the basic digital capabilities of enterprises, and problems have arisen accordingly.

It is undeniable that a large part of these budgets are wasted. Even a Gartner report mentioned that most CFOs and CEOs do not seem willing to invest more budget in marketing technology solutions. Does this mean that digitalization itself is a false proposition and that this concept, which has been hyped for three years, will also come to an end?

The answer is obviously no! In fact, the current situation is not caused by digitalization not helping business growth, but by the fact that many companies have not been able to effectively apply these solutions to their actual operations.

As the Gartner report mentions, marketers currently use only 42% of Martech technology stack capabilities (technology stack refers to the collection of software tools and technologies used to create a complete product or solution). Of course, because of this, it is difficult for marketers to prove the return on investment in technology.

Not to mention, there are a lot of overlaps between marketing technology solutions within many companies. At the same time, these solutions are cumbersome and complex, and even different solutions have different ecosystems. In addition, due to the hasty transformation of many companies, internal employees have very limited understanding of these solutions and technical means. Under the combined influence of these factors, low utilization of corporate marketing technology is almost inevitable.

In general, the root cause of these problems seems to be the lack of talent for digitalization. From the perspective of the entire digitalization, in the digital age, almost all aspects of the enterprise are accompanied by the generation of various data, which need to be managed in terms of storage, analysis, security, etc., and all of these require corresponding talents to manage and further utilize these data in the actual production process.

This is why Morketing believes that in 2023, promoting effective training of internal talents in enterprises will become a key trend.

After all, there are only two solutions to solve the problem of low utilization. One is to strengthen internal training, and the other is to find external contractors or consultants. However, from the current situation, if you want to solve this problem through external channels, you will most likely encounter resistance from the internal CFO. After all, these are two of the three most common areas where CFOs plan to cut budgets.

Therefore, in the coming year, the focus of CMO’s work may be on martech technology training, instilling the use of marketing technology into the team, and even adding martech technology usage rate to “target performance”, ultimately making better use of digitalization as a basic capability.

8. Further implementation and application of AI

The utilization rate of enterprise digitalization is not high, which is the pain point for many companies undergoing digital transformation. However, with the gradual completion of digital infrastructure, AI is being increasingly applied to the operation of enterprises.

As digitalization becomes one of the basic capabilities, more and more new technologies are being applied to the daily operations of enterprises. Among them, AI may be the most representative form of expression, especially at the end of 2022, ChatGPT has set off a wave of enthusiasm on the Internet. Perhaps this form of information interaction in the form of dialogue will replace the traditional website interaction form in the near future.

For example, instead of directing users to a registration page and then waiting for a response, conversational marketing uses customized messages and AI automation to interact with users as they visit the website. The digital marketing trend uses intelligent chatbots with machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to enable customers to have a two-way conversation with the brand.

Or, in addition to this change in front-end interaction, AI is also becoming an important helper for many small and medium-sized enterprises in the background of the entire marketing. For example, a recent study by Razorfish showed that three-quarters of marketers have not successfully applied user behavior data to online advertising targeting. New technologies will enable more small businesses to access and utilize this data at a low cost.

In addition, AI is being applied in many other fields that are closely related to marketing, thereby further helping companies achieve growth.

For example, as content marketing becomes more and more important, marketers always want to understand why some types of content work better than others. AI can break down content and evaluate its effectiveness, and more accurately predict its performance through image, text, and audio analysis (speech speed, tone, expressions, etc.). Therefore, AI can help marketers test content strategies and select the optimal content marketing design in real time and dynamically.

Or at the product level, as competition intensifies and product life cycles shorten, companies are facing unprecedented pressure to succeed in innovation and new product development. AI can analyze big data from social media, e-commerce platforms, and other sources to explore future market trends, and combine past sales performance to optimize product design, shorten development time, and improve corporate product innovation capabilities and success rates.

And bring better customer experience to consumers in actual offline experience.

9. Marketing focuses more on return on investment, and marketing products are shifting towards black box and high performance

Of course, in addition to these, AI is also directly helping the vast majority of advertisers get a better return on investment. For example, Google PMax and Meta ASC provide the platform with extensive advantages in positioning, bidding, and creative optimization. Similarly, Criteo released a product called Commerce Max in September 2022, and The Trade Desk also has a product called Koa. The reason why these products can bring better returns is basically inseparable from the application of machine learning.

But apart from being related to AI, these products have almost exactly the same operating ideas - they are almost all black box products without exception.

Although it is a black box product, advertisers are generally able to accept these "insignificant" shortcomings, especially when they can save time and improve delivery results. This means that to some extent, we can almost think that the entire advertising industry seems to be moving towards black box and high performance.

Specifically, if we take Meta and Google, the two most important players in the advertising industry, as examples, it is not difficult to find that both Meta ASC and Google PMax have two very similar characteristics:

On the one hand, the operating logic of ASC is indeed full of secrets. As Meta's advertising platform based on first-party data, the product called Advantage+ Shopping Ad Series (hereinafter referred to as ASC) by Meta can almost be said to be the darkest black box among all Facebook's advertising services. The reason why it is called a black box is that advertisers basically have no way of knowing how ASC operates, what kind of people are targeted, and how to target these people. ASC will only tell advertisers: how much money you spent today, and how much return the money spent has brought you.

On the other hand, it is very counterintuitive that although ASC is almost a completely black box, it is undeniable that this is indeed one of the best products in Meta in recent years. The most prominent one is of course the super "performance" mentioned above. At least at this stage, many advertisers who have used ASC are satisfied with this product and have also shown strong advantages in the creative optimization level. Many Meta ASC sales staff and agents have said in interviews with overseas media that ASC can extend 100-150 creative variants through 4 to 5 key creative elements.

But in general, based on feedback from subsequent agents and brands, it is highly likely that Meta and Google will focus the entire product on the return on advertising spending rather than transparency and controllability.

This also indirectly illustrates one thing: at least at this stage for agents and brands, the rate of return is obviously higher than other issues.

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the core of marketing in 2023 is likely to be contraction and stability maintenance, so in this case, brands will naturally pay more attention to ROI, which is one of the reasons why more and more digital advertisers are starting to launch products similar to ASC or PMax logic.

From the brand perspective, we pay more attention to ROI, and the strategy focuses on shrinkage and stability maintenance, which seems to be inconsistent with the fact that the companies mentioned above will pay more attention to the mental occupation of users.

But this is not the case. In fact, brand contraction does not mean that brand advertising will not be done. A study by IPA DATABANK showed that when the economy declines, cutting brand marketing budgets may help protect short-term profits, but after the economy recovers, brands will become weaker and have lower profits.

Therefore, in the past, many brands tend to promote high-profile advertising and pursue brand exposure. As "reducing costs and increasing efficiency" has become the main theme of various industries, brand advertising naturally needs to change.

For enterprises at this stage, this means that on the one hand, the brand hopes to eliminate the situation where "I don't know which half of my advertising spend is wasted", so most marketing that values ​​ROI will choose a platform with clear links. On the other hand, brands have also begun to pay attention to the conversion and precipitation of traffic after brand exposure, trying to establish a deeper connection between consumers' continuous purchase, loyalty management, remarketing, etc. in post-link marketing with front-end advertising flow.

The actual situation is similar. In the middle and late 2022, we saw that brands invest more and more budgets in social networks like Xiaohongshu and Douyin. However, the value of the back link is difficult to measure by traditional CTR indicators, so the platform also made corresponding adjustments and reactions and began to launch corresponding measurement systems to help brands measure the specific benefits of each investment.

10. "Scientific Planting Grass" has a higher weight

As brands pay more and more attention to social networks, planting grass is almost one of the hottest topics in 2022. After all, brands should pay attention to daily operations, build good content, and accumulate core people through three-dimensional planting methods. The big promotion will be more like a transformation node that accumulates strength and improves the scale and efficiency of the business. Therefore, as a planting grass that can win the minds of consumers and perfectly adapt to the current platform and consumer changes, it will naturally become one of the hottest marketing methods at present.

But if we look at other trends, grass planting will also move towards a more scientific direction. And more and more giants are also participating in it and launching corresponding products. For example, in the O-5A population asset model launched by Juliu Yuntu, we chose to define the A3 people who have multiple clicks, searches, and purchases for brand content, and have high recognition and consumption willingness to consume as "grass planting people". This year, we even further launched the brand-friendly product "grass planting people" with the optimization goal of grass planting as the goal.

After all, now, simple promotions can no longer attract consumers' attention as they did in the past. The Double 11 node has been extended from the first day to the current nearly one month cycle, and it has been getting longer and longer. Even so, sales are not optimistic. Since last year, Alibaba has stopped publishing the real-time transaction volume of the platform, and this year Alibaba has not announced the platform transaction volume of the Double 11 platform.

At the same time, the mind of big promotions has been squeezed by the promotion of year-round discounts such as live streaming goods and 10 billion subsidies. It is often said that after the birth of live streaming goods, it is a big promotion every day. Consumers purchase goods through daily big promotions has gradually become a new consumption habit.

From the platform level, e-commerce platforms are gradually changing into a combination of shelves and interest e-commerce. Specifically, Douyin E-commerce, the largest player in interest e-commerce, launched the "Tik Tok Mall" this year and proposed the concept of "all-region interest e-commerce". The biggest change is that the centralized e-commerce portal has been added on the basis of short video e-commerce and live e-commerce. Consumers can realize "people looking for goods" like Taobao and JD.com on Douyin.

On the contrary, Taobao is vigorously expanding its live streaming and selling goods. After Weiya and Li Jiaqi gradually retreated behind the scenes, Taobao brought anchors such as Oriental Selection and Luo Yonghao to its own platform to strengthen consumers' awareness that they can also watch and buy on Taobao. The trend is already very obvious. For most merchants, shelf e-commerce and content e-commerce cannot be ignored. Excellent e-commerce operators should be good at content and shelves.

Wang Hui, general manager of Zhuimi Technology China, also put forward a similar view in an interview with Morketing: "The normalization of large promotions, daily sales, and short-chainization of customers' grass planting to purchases are major trends. Large promotions are no longer just an enhanced version of the price reduction promotion model, but can focus on resources to expand brands and precise groups, and will gradually widen the gap with competitors."

In fact, in Morketing's view, scientific grass planting is almost in line with most of the trends that may exist in mid-2023. For brand owners, grass planting content tests the brand's ability to understand its own users' preferences, and also requires a strong content team within the brand to produce high-quality content that can touch consumers, and ultimately occupy the user's mind and complete the conversion. At the platform level, grass planting model is also in line with the platform's new model of combining shelf e-commerce + interest e-commerce, and can transform big promotions from simple promotions in the past into a suitable burst node.

Perhaps the first change in marketing business in 2023 will start with the marketing method of planting grass.

11. Conclusion

Rather than saying that 2023 is a year of recession and not optimistic, it is better to say that 2023 is a year of reform on the basis of maintaining stability.

With the combination of basic capacity building of marketing business, the chemical reactions arising from the combination of new technologies and the demands of enterprises for survival and expansion, perhaps we will see that marketing has more possibilities.

Author: Morketing

WeChat public account: Morketing (ID: Morketing)