One of my influencers, Rita McGrath, wrote a blog post this week, that reminded me that strategic thinking is about making choices and figuring out how to move forward.
It’s not about seeing into the future. Because none of us can do that. Even if we think we can.
In preparation to write this post, I sat down to do a bit of googling on marketing trends for 2021. And for a laugh I also googled 2020 marketing trends from last January. Just to see if these trends survived the pandemic.
Certainly, I didn’t expect any of the 2020 predictions to be that we would have a global event that completely changed the way that we work and engage with our customers. (Which none of them did).
It is the time of year that people talk about trends and predictions. It seems to be a cousin of resolutions.
You might think that because I am a data person that I hold the opposite view, that data is the crystal ball to see into the future. After all, why else would you track data, then to identify trends. Why rely on leading indicators at all if I don’t believe you can fully predict the future.
But, to me, the purpose of trying to identify trends, is so that we can make informed decisions and plan our next actions. That we gain some confidence in what we come up with as to our how we will move forward. So we can strategize more effectively.
Oh, and what was the the trend that kept popping up in my googling? That showed up regularly in most of 2021 marketing prediction articles. And had some shape in 2020. What is it?
Continuously transforming how customers experience your business. The need to innovate around how we use technology, use data, and our business models so that the customer is at the heart of everything we do.
The more things change the more they stay the same. The why we are in business remains the customer. The trend is that the how they experience our business changes.