My year of possibilities & other people's stories - Trends for 2014 and the year before.

It’s flattering but quite daunting to be asked to predict the future of your trade by your peers, especially in just a couple of brief punchy paragraphs.  The best I can ever do is to try and give a feel for other people’s ideas, themes (and usually attitudes), that have looked strong and important to me. It’s not soothsaying, but I take inspiration from them and try and use their power and attitude to shape my own work and thinking.  

I state these things as my predictions for the future only in the hope that by highlighting them, they will be picked up by more people, rather than as any dead cert you could take to the bookies.  The upshot is that I then spend the year seeking out like-minded campaigns and brands - not to prove my point - but to reaffirm my faith that good ideas with purpose and passion can drive commercial success.

When Sonja at Valuable Content first asked me for my vision for 2013 I wrote hopefully, “I think that we’re going to hear a lot about ‘brand ecosystems’; where like-minded groups of businesses and their customers become more reliant on, and helpful towards, each other. 

Call it strength in numbers or even a positive pack mentality, but companies that work with their friends will have extra power and we’ll trust them more. It’s only natural; an ecosystem is reliant on symbiosis and collaboration and so is commerce. To quote brand Jedi Mark Sears, it is “the maximisation of self by ensuring the success of the whole.” Buying from and trading with groups of similar companies, with real purpose and mission (as well as profit), will grow super-loyal customers for life.”

http://www.therivetpress.com/

And subsequently this year I found plenty.  There’s a grand Ecosystem flourishing on the west coast of Wales lead by The Do Lectures, Hiut Denim and Fforrest that now encompasses dozens of new businesses, food producers, farmers, chocolatiers and bakeries that both covertly and overtly work together for the greater good.  

The perfect illustration of this is the 25 mile eating house that sources all it’s food and raw ingredients from within 25 miles of their high street spot.  The idea is not only instinctively ‘right’ but is also a bold new ecosystem that consciously promotes and propagates great local suppliers.  And with that mission at its core it is far, far greater than just the sum of it’s parts.  

There is something very positive in the air over Cardigan and they welcome in anyone who asks for help.  They share their knowledge and experience freely and mentor potentially competitive entrepreneurs, before sending them off to do their own thing elsewhere.

Another great example is the Australian collective The Design Kids, who function as a mentoring and commercial ecosystem to nurture and amplify young creative talent and to help market their work.  They are not an umbrella brand or distributor; their whole raison d’etre is collaboration, help and mutually assured success.  As my friend Mark Sears taught me, the big old trees look after the young saplings to ensure they all continue to grow well together.

So it was not a great surprise when I started seeing and enjoying brands that were using their customers’ stories and their friends successes to very subtly market their own brands.  It was collaboration and mutual promotion in a different way but when I got the call from Valuable Content towers in December I was confident that this was what I wanted to write about.

“This year we are not going to be focussing on the stuff, or beautiful people using the stuff, but just on the things real people are doing with the stuff.   We’ll see a lot more companies telling other people’s stories and they’ll be truer, richer and more natural.  The kicker is that they might not even feature that company’s product; they’ll just share the same values or style.   

Case studies and endorsements have always been compelling marketing tools, but they are becoming more artful, more beautifully opaque and even a bit more obscure.  They’ll be whatever the opposite of ‘in your face’ is; subtle and sophisticated.  Quite often they won’t even feature a product; they’ll just show the possibilities.   Most products aren’t actually very exciting but the things people do with boring saucepans, cameras, shoes and computers never ceases to amaze us, to delight us and to inspire us.  

You won’t be sold to, you’ll be nudged; “This is what someone just like you is doing. You could do that too.  You don’t even need our stuff, you just need our attitude.” Content marketing will work best this year when it’s subtly gone beyond valuable to be inspiring.”

I don’t claim that this is in any way new, but the nuance and subtlety is, in a funny way,  far more honest than the kind of aspiration marketing that luxury brands have used for years.  It’s about loosening the restrictions of brand compliant taglines, colours and messaging and not worrying about master brand logo placement rules. Show some well-chosen snippets of your real world and then let the audience pick up the clues.  

Watch Finisterre’s Coldwater People and try and identify who is - or mainly who isn’t - wearing their apparel.  And the point is that it doesn’t matter.  They are all cold water surfers and that’s all Finisterre cares about. They are actively promoting the category of Cold Water Surfing way ahead of products and letting us find our way happily towards their state of mind and later, but surely, to their website.  It’s compelling and infectious.  If you’ve got ten minutes to spare then watch their Fv25 film.  There’s almost zero product, but it’s a frost-kissed, blissed out, winter surf trip and the tingle and crisp of frozen wetsuits will drive you to buy.   

More than one person has pointed out the fact that this kind of marketing is easier for sexy lifestyle brands like surf gear and denim manufacturers or restaurants and holidays, where the seduction is easier to swallow, but that it’s harder with more prosaic and mundane companies.  That’s a little bit true of course but they are mainly missing the point.  The aim here is to show what can be done and what is possible in the most natural and resonant style so it simply has to be real and has to ring your targets’ bells.  We make business technology, which really isn’t anything like as sexy as jeans, but it is working for us too.

I am happy to say that this film is a pretty good illustration of 2013 & 2014’s predictions combined.   BeerBods is the central hub of a superb ecosystem that gets people drinking better beer, by telling the stories of ultra-small craft breweries.  And we’re letting founder Matt tell his own story, a small part of which includes a British built laptop.  

So 2014 is my year of possibility marketing (of course that’s its name).  We’re going to put our customers front and centre and we’ll tell their stories as simply and as beautifully as possible,  because as Vidal Sassoon used to say “If you look good, we look good”.