10 Marketing Trends for 2023

2022 is not an easy year. The annual keywords of some regions and media have already represented the tone of the year. Will the world become better in 2023? The predictions given by various authoritative organizations are not optimistic. The author of this article proposes ten marketing trends in 2023.

This year, the most searched word in the British Collins Dictionary is permacrisis, which means persistent crisis. Obviously, the West believes that this is a year of recession.

Japan's annual kanji this year is "war," which represents the chaos and unrest in Japanese society.

The Chinese character chosen by Lianhe Zaobao for Singapore's annual is "涨", which represents the soaring prices, which of course brings troubles to people's lives. Obviously, this is not a positive word either.

The IMF predicts that the global economic growth rate will be 2.7% in 2023, 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.

Generally speaking, if the economic environment does not improve significantly, companies' investment in marketing will tend to be conservative. Therefore, the main theme of marketing in 2023 will not be expansion, but contraction and stabilization.

Here are the marketing trends I think will be in 2023.

01Offline marketing resumes, but there is no revenge consumption

Goldman Sachs predicts that China's GDP will grow by 4.5% in 2023, and KPMG believes that China is expected to achieve 5.2% growth in 2023. Compared with the pessimism in the West, this is an encouraging signal.

The source of confidence depends to a large extent on the growth of residents' consumption. For a long time in the past, offline businesses have been shattered by the epidemic. After the adjustment of prevention and control policies, offline business and consumption will usher in a wave of explosive growth. Of course, this explosion is compared with the depression of the past six months.

Last weekend during Christmas, the first batch of people from Yangkang in Beijing began to go out of their homes, and offline business once again ushered in the hustle and bustle before the epidemic. In the picture below, the flow of people at IKEA Siyuanqiao has recovered to a large extent, and a crowded scene is about to come.

In this world, nothing can stop humans from consuming.

Similarly, with the recovery of offline business, conferences and exchanges in various industries and sectors over the past year will also see a revival. For example, this month, I saw the Douyin e-commerce beauty and food summit on WeChat Moments.

As a B2B precision marketing method, offline meetings and marketing will gradually get on track in the coming year. Similarly, on the 2C side, various offline marketing will also reappear.

But the return of offline commerce is only a recovery, not an explosion. A joke goes like this: "Merchants are waiting for us to make retaliatory purchases, but in the end we all choose to let go of our hatred."

After three years of the epidemic, most consumers lack confidence in consumption, saving money to fight uncertainty has become the mainstream, and consumers' consumption tends to be conservative, so "revenge consumption" will not come.

For example, in 2023, Starbucks China will most likely see growth, but this growth will be compared to 2022, not 2019. Offline businesses need to be prepared for this.

02Healing Marketing——Travel, Relaxation and Leisure See Growth

The three-year epidemic has brought physical and psychological trauma to many people. Once the restrictions are lifted, the first thing people need is comfort and healing.

"On the beach in Sanya, there are people who have been exposed to the sun in Beijing." This is not a joke, but a fact. My friend said that he stayed in Sanya for a week and felt that the warmth and emotions helped him recover. This is certainly not an absolute causal relationship, but more of a psychological satisfaction after people's need to heal their trauma is met.

In the past few years, the pandemic has made the stay-at-home economy a new trend, and industries such as pre-prepared meals have also seen a wave of growth. The closest thing people can do to nature is to play Frisbee and camp in the suburbs. For many people in the workplace, even if they have annual leave, there is nowhere to go.

After the relaxation, traveling, self-driving and other leisure and relaxation methods will become the choice of many Yangkang people. This New Year's Day, some popular scenic spots have been fully booked.

Obviously, a lifestyle based on soothing, relaxation and leisure will gradually occupy social networks. In 2023, there will definitely be more and more travel notes on Xiaohongshu and Douyin, which is an opportunity for many brands.

03Consumption downgrade continues, cost-effective brands return to the spotlight

In the stage of consumption upgrading, almost every brand is considering how to upgrade. Improving brand tone and increasing selling prices through product research and development, packaging, marketing and other means are the ultimate goals pursued by brands. Some brands, such as Li Ning and Anta, have achieved the first step in brand upgrading.

At this stage, although cost-effective brands also have a huge market, buying cost-effective products has become synonymous with low-end consumers. Although Xiaomi, the earliest Internet mobile phone brand, sold well due to its high cost-effectiveness when it was launched on the market, it has never gotten rid of the "low-end" problem and is called a "diaosi" phone by many people. Users of Apple phones have always looked down on those who use Xiaomi phones.

However, market trends are changing rapidly. After the trend of consumption downgrade came, consumers tended to be rational. They were no longer willing to pay for gimmicks such as packaging and marketing, but instead seriously considered the cost-effectiveness of a product.

The essence of cost-effectiveness at this stage is to consider the quality of the product. If a product is of good quality and not expensive, it will definitely be popular with consumers. For example, brands such as Honor, Xiaomi, and IQOO are competing fiercely for this market.

A product can win the market if it is of good quality but a little more expensive. For example, if a new iPhone can be used for four or five years, it is also a high-cost-effective brand.

In general, more and more consumers are paying for quality rather than marketing. This year, the term "ice cream assassin" became a hot search, making many consumers realize the importance of returning to cost-effectiveness. The following highly praised answer is an obvious reflection of this.

04New consumption faces off against old giants

At the end of last year, I predicted that new consumer brands would be differentiated. New consumer brands that have gained early market advantages will continue to expand traditional marketing investment and expand their market share, such as Yuanqi Forest, Heytea, Huaxizi, etc., while new consumer brands that have not established brand moats may face difficulties in financing and continuing to expand market investment, thus ushering in difficult times.

Many new consumer brands died in 2022, but brands that established advantages in the early stages still have deep moats. For example, Yuanqi Forest has gained an advantage in the sugar-free sparkling water market segment by relying on its differentiated positioning in the early stages.

However, if new consumption is to develop upward, it will sooner or later touch the sphere of influence of old consumption. At the beginning of this year, Sina Finance reported that "Coke said that in 2022, there will be no more Yuanqi Forest sparkling water on the market; both Coca-Cola and Yuanqi Forest have held a meeting and are determined to bring down Yuanqi Forest."

In the second half of this year, Yuanqi Forest launched sugar-free cola-flavored sparkling water. Following this trend, it is only a matter of time before it launches sugar-free cola and seizes the market share of the two colas. Previously, Yuanqi Forest's electrolyte water and mineral water have also been launched on the market.

This made Nongfu Spring extremely nervous, and it began to encircle and suppress the channels of Yuanqi Forest. There were reports that as long as the store put Nongfu Spring products in Yuanqi Forest's freezer, they could get an equal amount of Changbaixue mineral water.

The war between Yuanqi Forest and Nongfu Spring, Coca-Cola and others represents the struggle between new consumption and old giants. Competitive situations such as Luckin Coffee VS Starbucks and Huaxizi VS L'Oreal have also emerged.

Before 2021, new consumer brands took the lead by relying on market segmentation and "slow development", but after 2022, old consumer giants began to consciously suppress the expansion of new consumption, and new consumption will face the challenges of old giants on the front battlefield.

05Shelf and content e-commerce integration, global e-commerce marketing becomes a consensus

In 2021, at the end of "Understanding Interest E-commerce VS Shelf E-commerce in One Article", I predicted that the future direction of e-commerce platforms must be a combination of shelves and interests , and this prediction has come true.

Douyin, the largest player in interest e-commerce, launched the "Douyin Mall" this year and proposed the concept of "global interest e-commerce". The biggest change is the addition of a centralized e-commerce portal on the basis of short video e-commerce and live broadcast e-commerce. Consumers can find goods on Douyin just like Taobao and JD.com.

At the same time, Taobao is also vigorously expanding the influence of live streaming sales. After Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi gradually retreated behind the scenes, Taobao brought anchors such as Dongfang Zhenxuan and Luo Yonghao to its own platform to strengthen consumers' awareness that they can also buy while watching on Taobao.

The trend is already very obvious. For most merchants, both shelf e-commerce and content e-commerce cannot be ignored. Excellent e-commerce operators should be good at both content and shelves.

The final prediction is that due to the potential of shelf e-commerce, Douyin e-commerce is likely to see substantial growth in 2023.

06Live E-commerce 2.0: The next Oriental Selection is expected to be born

In the middle of this year, the live streaming e-commerce industry was dominated by Oriental Selection, and industry insiders were shocked to find out that live streaming can be played like this!

The main reason for the popularity of Oriental Selection is attributed to the high-quality content produced by New Oriental teachers headed by Dong Yuhui.

This is the choice made by users for their favorite content after the "buy it, buy it" live broadcast faced aesthetic fatigue. In fact, this form of content live broadcast has emerged since last year. A down jacket brand went to Mount Everest for live broadcast, and Herborist conducted a palace drama-style live broadcast. They are all trying to change the drawbacks of hawking live broadcast, until Oriental Selection took content live broadcast to a new height.

Judging from the case of Oriental Selection, its live streaming sales have bid farewell to the crude hawking-style sales of the past, and it can be said that it has ushered in the 2.0 era of live streaming e-commerce.

In the second half of the year, the T97 coffee anchor performed a rap-style live broadcast that ignited the live broadcast room, which was a response to live e-commerce 2.0.

As a platform with an extremely rich content ecosystem, Douyin excels at creating popular content and new internet celebrities. From Liu Genghong to Oriental Selection to T97 Coffee, these anchors have demonstrated a new way of live streaming content and allowed many e-commerce operators to see the potential of live streaming e-commerce 2.0.

In 2023, the next Oriental Selection is expected to be born on various social media platforms.

07 Platform-level promotions have decreased, while live streaming promotions have become the norm

The Double 11 shopping festival has been extended from one day to nearly a month now. Even so, sales are not optimistic. Alibaba stopped publishing the real-time transaction volume of its platform last year, and this year it did not publish the transaction volume of its platform on Double 11.

When talking about why there was no shopping during the Double 11 shopping festival this year, words like "low desire" and "consumption downgrade" frequently appeared. In the era of consumption downgrade, consumers have begun to consciously resist consumerism and spend less on shopping if they can.

At this time, consumers are reducing unnecessary expenses on the one hand, and pursuing cost-effectiveness in necessary expenses on the other hand, instead of being blindly influenced by brands.

Consumers are increasingly unwilling to pay for "brand taxes".

Double 11, represented mainly by Tmall, is generally the Double 11 of brands. In the past, consumers would buy big-name products during this big promotion period because of the brand advantages and appropriate discounts, and many people would make purchases.

If Double 11 can still create demand and stimulate consumers' desire to buy in good years when everyone has a lot of spare money, then in the era of consumption downgrade, when consumer demand is not strong to begin with, consumers will no longer blindly pursue brands, and thus Double 11, which mainly focuses on brands, will no longer be so popular.

In this context, consumers like to participate in big sales, but they only like low-frequency sales. Their basic mentality is to buy at a cheap price once every six months, and one purchase is enough for half a year, and they try not to spend money at other times.

At the same time, the mentality of big promotions has been squeezed by live streaming and 10 billion yuan in subsidies, which are perennial promotions. It is often said that after the birth of live streaming, every day is a big promotion. Consumers buying goods through daily big promotions has gradually become a new consumption habit.

08Visual search takes the lead

The world has inevitably moved from the text age to the visual age. The visual here refers to pictures and short videos. The two representative platforms are Xiaohongshu and Douyin respectively.

At the same time, the way people obtain information has also changed. As for the act of searching alone, more and more people are starting to search on visual social media rather than text-based search engines.

At the beginning of this year, ByteDance CEO Zhang Nan released a Weibo news report saying that Douyin video search had more than 550 million monthly active users. This number exceeded the 530 million monthly active users disclosed by Baidu App in April 2020.

Obviously, times have changed. Compared with search engines, visual search is fast, convenient and intuitive . For example, searching for how to cook a dish, the efficiency of searching for short videos on Xiaohongshu and Douyin is much higher than 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 look at TikTok or Instagram first when looking for a place to lunch, rather than Google Maps or search.

Moreover, if consumers see videos made by experts they are familiar with during the search process, they tend to have a stronger sense of trust in them, and therefore are more likely to place an order.

Through visual search, consumers can see an intuitive and vivid consumption process and experience, which is much faster than text description.

Therefore, for most brands and businesses, it is extremely important to optimize visual search platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin.

09Marketing pays more and more attention to the input-output ratio

The article begins by saying that the main theme of marketing in 2023 will not be expansion, but contraction and stabilization. Under such circumstances, brand advertising and sponsorship, which are mainly aimed at brand exposure and mind occupation, will shrink, while marketing methods that focus on measurable ROI will be more valued by brands.

Of course, brand contraction does not mean that they will not do brand advertising, but they are more willing to do cost-effective marketing. For example, for well-known brands, cross-border cooperation is a high ROI marketing method. This method can not only make the brand exposure reach the effect of 1+1>2, but also actually promote the sales of products. The cooperation between Luckin Coffee and Coco Tree Coconut Juice belongs to this method.

Cross-border marketing will remain popular in 2023, and more brands will adopt this marketing method.

On the other hand, a high ROI marketing method is to eliminate the situation of "I don't know which half of my advertising fee is wasted". Therefore, most marketing that values ​​ROI will choose platforms with clear links. Brands will invest more and more budget in social networks such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin, and less and less in traditional advertising.

10 yuan universe marketing enters deep water

Since Mark Zuckerberg went all in on the metaverse, the popularity of VR has been pushed to its peak. Since 2021, VR has been valued by major Internet giants, and they have invested heavily in it.

In 2021, virtual characters greatly excited the marketing circle. Liu Yexi gained 1 million followers overnight, which greatly increased people's confidence in virtual characters. Even the public relations giant Blue Label began to invest heavily in this field.

But the reality is that the development of VR is not as fast and good as the industry imagined. Meta (Facebook)'s market value evaporated by nearly 70% in 2022, indicating that the capital market is not optimistic about the development of the metaverse. After Liu Yexi, there has been no phenomenal virtual characters in the marketing circle, and these virtual characters are also difficult to continue to attract the attention of the public.

The popularization of VR devices is not as fast as expected. The sales of a large number of leading VR device brands have fallen short of expectations, indicating that they have not been recognized by users in the consumer market. Even many consumers who have bought the devices just leave them at home gathering dust after playing with them a few times.

All signs indicate that, at least in the short term, VR marketing cannot become a new driving force for the industry, and it is too early for VR to be popularized and widely used.

When it comes to virtual characters or IP, companies should realize that it is impossible to use them as a lever to get big returns with small investments.

Conclusion:

The above are the marketing trends I listed for 2023. Various circles are not optimistic about the predictions for 2023. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the main theme of marketing next year is not expansion, but contraction and stabilization.

Holding on and being stable means everything.

Author: Xunkong, WeChat public account: Xunkong’s Marketing Revelation