Martin Kihn, SVP Strategy, Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

There are a lot of forces rocking marketing these days, and they don’t all start with AI. The good news is that enterprises are leaning more on marketing as the discipline closest to the customer. Seventy-eight percent of CEOs say they’re looking more at marketing for growth, according to a recent survey.

The bad news is, in a word: pressure. Pressure for results—and the relentless requirement to stay on top of what’s happening with customers, markets and technology. It’s no wonder that CMO tenure is stuck at its lowest point in 10 years, according to search firm Spencer Stuart.

Based on my conversations with CMOs across the globe and marketing surveys, here are 14 candidates for the biggest trends in marketing today:

1. We’re in the age of the post-verbal consumer.

Consumers are moving their like button from text to images to video. Bloggers are trending to video; logos are going text-free. And videos are getting shorter: YouTube reported explosive growth in views of videos under one minute. The TikTok Effect is here—what? Squirrel.

What to do (WTD): Master short-form video or hire someone.

2. Tolerance for any friction is going to zero.

A slight delay in page-load time, confusion at the checkout, disappointing product recommendations. Eighty percent of consumers say they’ll drop a brand after three bad at-bats. There’s money to be made in removing friction: Look at what Tesla did to the car-buying experience.

WTD: Look for places to get the lead out.

3. Generational labels no longer work.

Millennials are self-centered and experiential; baby boomers are smug and judgmental. Like most stereotypes, these aren’t very useful. We’re splintering along different lines these days, and Pew Research announced it’s downplaying generational labels.

WTD: Pay attention to behavioral drivers (location, mood) instead.

4. Survey responses are getting less reliable.

Surveys—that aging staple of the insights team—are getting harder to do and less reliable. Response rates are down, and people online are more performative. Some analysts suggest up to 50% of people give misleading responses.

WTD: Rely on more in-depth (and offline) surveys.

5. People are more paranoid—especially about data.

A series of public data storms—Snowden, Cambridge Analytica, leaks—and deep dives like The New York Times‘ “What Do They Know and How Do They Know It?” made consumers wary. Google search trends for “tracking” are up 25 times in the past 20 years, and there’s still no federal privacy law in the U.S.

WTD: Overshare what you’re doing with data—and why.

6. The ‘Paradox of Privacy’ is real and really important.

Consumers think and act in weird ways with data: This is the Paradox of Privacy. Eighty percent of consumers say they feel little control, yet 48% will share information. We can’t decide whether to opt-in or not because we don’t really know the trade-offs.

WTD: Tell people exactly what they’re getting in return for their data.

7. Best way to gain customers’ trust is to be popular.

How do you become a trusted brand? Incentives? Celebrities? Fonts? It’s simpler than that (and harder): Have happy customers. Some surveys show a direct correlation (download required) between trust and satisfaction.

WTD: Do your job well, and trust will follow.

8. Marketers and consumers see the world (very) differently.

It’s natural for employees of a company (or agency) to assume their customers are like them—but that’s a projection. Consumers can find personalization “creepy” while marketers assume it makes them feel “valued.” Who’s right?

WTD: Don’t assume anything about your customer without checking.

9. The most valuable marketing investment is often analytics.

The Duke CMO Survey showed a spike in spending analytics on analytics. CMOs said they anticipate analytics’ share of the marketing budget will grow from 6% in 2020 to 14.5% in three years.

WTD: Don’t skimp on data, analytics and tools.

10. Yes, AI changes everything—but not how you think.

Of course, AI will be widely used in marketing. But in the short term, at least, changes are likely to be incremental: learning prompt engineering; creating copy for robots to read (i.e., SEO); and high-quantity (not quality) text generation.

WTD: Start with experiments, with a human in the loop.

11. Large language models still need refinement.

If something is available to your competitors, it’s not a source of advantage. The only way to make large language models sing is to tune them on your first-party data, but this requires experts (see trend No. 8) using something like a trust framework.

WTD: Focus your GenAI team on what’s unique.

12. If you don’t have first-party data, there are now more ways to get it.

Marketers are revving up their first-party collection engines, but what if you don’t have a lot of it? Retailers like Walmart and Kroger are more than willing to lend you theirs. So-called retail media networks (RMNs) aren’t just for retail anymore: Uber, Marriott and your favorite airline agree.

WTD: Become an expert in the RMN space, if you need it.

13. Personalization is extending into brands.

I call this the Taylor Swift Effect, based on research I’ve done. Why is Swift the most valuable brand on the planet? In part because she’s all things to all people: a cat lover to cat lovers, a dog lover to dog lovers, a football fan to—well, bad example. But you get the idea.

WTD: Make your brand flexible enough to adapt to all the “tribes” out there.

14. Every business is now in show business.

Toys are in the movie business; energy drinks are sports promoters; even my company, a B2B software company, launched its own streaming channel. Candy bars have “Limited Editions” and spin-offs and Christmas specials. To keep customers’ fragmented attention, we can all learn from the dream factory.

WTD: The first master marketer was P. T. Barnum. Enough said.

Conclusion

Most of these themes point to a similar response: Winning marketing needs more first-party data gathered with consent.

Old labels (“OK boomer”) and methods (surveys) don’t work as well, so smart marketers will rely more on behavioral and real-time data and advanced analytics. AI has unlimited potential but requires guardrails to make it useful. And the importance of unstructured data like text and video is going to grow, requiring new databases and models.

For savvy marketers with their eyes wide open to changes in consumer behavior and technology, there’s never been a better time to jump the trends.