Food Network ratings data shows that one of the most popular times of the day for viewing is between midnight and 4 a.m. One possible explanation for the popularity of this late-night slot is that it overlaps with the times restaurant owners working long shifts are getting home and turning on their TV to decompress. Network data also shows that more than 70 percent of independent restaurant owners watch the Food Network at least once a week.
While the audience for Restaurant Impossible may not have been only restaurant owners, those owners were part of the audience. That was the light bulb at the heart of the trend of B2Beyond Marketing.
If using mass-marketing techniques is effective in reaching your audience, then anyone else you reach are not wastage… they are a bonus.
Since this trend was initially researched and reported nearly five years ago, things have continued to evolve, and it has become even more relevant. Over time, the practice of B2B marketing as a category has increasingly involved more content creation, better storytelling, and a continuing evolution away from the mindset that all marketing for a B2B brand should only be seen by a niche audience.
The trend, in other words has escalated, and become even more relevant and important. Let’s take a look at how, and shift our attention to a few more modern examples, starting with an unlikely B2B brand that has built a surprisingly large following on social media: the world’s largest container shipping company.
How the Boring Gets Interesting … On Social Media
The maritime shipping brand Maersk Line uses content marketing across more than 30 different social media channels to bring the world of shipping containers and ocean liners to life. Across most of these channels, they have tens of thousands of follower, most of whom are not part of the maritime industry at all.
The content they share engages people while teaching them interesting facts about the industry. Several recent posts, for example, have included images of ships, videos about what life is really like on board, and plenty of other behind-the-scenes content showing how the maritime industry operates.
Social Media ad unit from Maersk to promote upcoming Facebook live session.
This content is not only humanizing the industry, but also offering a way for those who do work with Maersk to explain what they do to family and friends. It creates a shareable moment that allows the brand to improve its reputation, more effectively recruit top talent, and bolster a sense of pride among current employees in what they do everyday—and why it matters.
Making Construction Equipment Fun
If you happen to be in a B2B business, at this point, you might be skeptical about exactly how all this storytelling will really impact the bottom line. Is the investment of time and resources in these activities really worth it?
The unique marketing strategy employed by construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar may offer one clue that it does. Several years ago, the brand made a shift in marketing strategy to develop more advertising capable of creating a sense of awe among their audience and the general public. In one memorable piece, they featured machines facing off in an epic Jenga game, with the goal of removing 700-pound wooden blocks one by one from a tall stack until eventually, the entire stack collapsed. The video went viral, and has racked up more than 5 million views to date.
The point, shares Caterpillar Global Brand Creative Director Archie Lyons, is “to take the Cat brand on the offensive. We are a large, Fortune 50 company… we want to go from cold, corporate, and conservative to human, relevant, and approachable.”[38]
The video series clearly does that–but it has also faced some predictable B2B industry criticism. How valuable are branded videos like this, skeptics ask, when they are most likely to be seen and shared by people who are not prospective buyers or qualified leads?
Caterpillar “Built for It” Campaign
Lyons offers his own answer to this question: “The campaign is designed to reach people outside of our normal scope of customers. The viewer for these videos could be a teenage boy who likes to play Jenga, and he might show his mom and dad, or uncles, who may work in construction.”
The value, in other words, comes from starting conversations from person to person–which may eventually lead to consideration, growing reputation, and eventually to purchase. As with many forms of brand marketing, tying the impact directly to a single sale is difficult. Could you really attribute an industry buyer purchasing a fleet of construction equipment to something like a viral YouTube video? Unlikely.
Most B2B marketing teams know that the buying cycle for their products is long. It takes months, and sometimes even years, to close a sale, and a lot of activities happen within that time. Customers see industry analyst reports, they look at the age and utility of their current solutions, they evaluate their options, and they watch quirky marketing videos. All have an impact on the eventual decision to buy.
In that context, it is easy to see how efforts like this could have real value. Generating attention for your brand, reminding a potential customer of what you do, getting them excited about your product features, and giving them a way to share what they do with family and friends outside of the industry are all important results from effectively using B2Beyond Marketing.
Inside Intel
For more than two decades, Intel has had to get creative about their marketing. As an ingredient brand, they know the challenges of marketing to consumers who never buy their product directly. Over the past five years, the brand has been on a journey to use content marketing and cultivate an in-house team of journalists to produce highly engaging content that helps the brand stay relevant and reach people.
Today, their digital magazine platform, known as iQ by Intel, is a powerhouse–with hundreds of posted articles on everything from how technology is revolutionizing restaurants to a behind-the-scenes look at the VR experience related to the Steven Spielberg film Ready Player One. The brand has adopted the same mindset as a publisher, aiming to build a loyal audience over time and continually offer interesting and thoughtful content to keep them coming back.
In many ways, it is the opposite of the traditional white-paper strategy. Rather than create a few highly academic and technical reports and force people to “pay” by surrendering their email address for the purposes of lead generation, B2Beyond Marketing is driving brands to think like Intel: find something useful to say, and to offer it freely in a way that is interesting to people far outside your industry.
Why It Matters
In Chapter 19, we will talk about the value of Intersection Thinking. A key argument for this is the idea that you can take lessons from outside your industry and apply them within to come up with new solutions and innovative ideas. This is a trend inspired by the idea that B2B brands can take and use inspiration from brands that sell to a variety of customers and industries.
The implication is that B2B brands can and should do more to get on the radar of potential customers before those customers even identify a need, and they can do this by using less traditional forms of media. The future of B2B marketing will be about creating better content, leveraging tactics and ideas that were once considered solely the realm of B2C brands, and ultimately building credibility by being more human.
How to Use This Trend:
Make it fundamental–When it comes to changing how we think about B2B marketing, much of the resistance comes from getting mired in the complexity of a feature or message. Yet Volvo didn’t fret over whether people would know what “dynamic steering” was, or even whether they would care. Their real message was that Volvo technology can make driving surprisingly smooth–even if the driving experience happens to be two trucks going backward with an action superstar balanced between them. People got the message.
Get over the fear of wastage–It is easy to think that making your content and marketing available to a broader audience will be too expensive and wasteful. When Sysco partnered with the Food Network, they didn’t worry about how many non-restaurant owners migh
t see their message. Instead, they focused on the fact that if they told their story simply (we reliably supply fresh food!), their target audience would get it, and act on it when they had a need.
Note: This trend was originally published in the 2016 Non-Obvious Trend Report, and is included in this new trend report with revised examples and new insights.
10
Fad Fatigue
What’s the Trend?
Consumers get weary of innovations claiming to be the “next big thing,” and assume none will last long.
Today, when people look for the latest tips on how to lose weight, or for the new popular “lifehack” to supercharge their productivity, they turn to the Internet. What the Internet usually delivers, however, is a mishmash of cutting-edge discoveries, half-baked theories, and celebrity-endorsed pseudoscience. Extracting what matters and what doesn’t—or what matters for a short while until it doesn’t—is not always easy.
There is a difference between a trend and a fad.
In every edition of this book, I am careful to distinguish between the two and it is a subject of constant discussion and debate among my team. In Part 1 of this book, I shared our definition of a non-obvious trend: a unique, curated observation of the accelerating present. Along with spotlighting and sharing meaningful trends every year, I often find myself cautioning readers against the overexcitement and misplaced faith that fads may inspire.
The enthusiasm around a “fad” is always intense and viral, and though it will, by definition, be short-lived, that can be hard to see in the moment. In Part 4 of this book, you will find a detailed appendix in which we transparently review and rate all of the previous trend predictions included in every year of this report. There are well over 100–and some of them have not stood the test of time.
Every year, these past ideas are tested through dozens of workshops with global clients and keynote presentations at events around the world. All of these live audiences engage with the trends, offer feedback, and provide the ultimate focus group with information to see what works, what lasts, and what doesn’t.
Why Do Some Trends Last Longer Than Others?
Looking back, what was it that caused some predictions to fare better than others? The secret usually came down to avoiding the distraction of smaller, fleeting examples of interesting innovation, and instead focus on bigger stories across multiple industries. The harder my team and I tried to find a pattern among stories of popular fads, the more apparent it became that these fads were not aligning to reveal a single broader shift or behavioral change. Instead, we realized that the speed of their rise was often accompanied by a faster fall from public conversation. If there was a bell curve for fad adoption, its range was looking a lot more like a giant tsunami than a small hill.
We asked a new question: could the roller coaster of attention itself be indicating what the broader trend might be? As we looked deeper, we discovered a deep sense of fatigue among consumers. People seemed to assume that any new discovery or “miracle” product would only last for a short while. The nature of this speedy expiry itself led us to describe a non-obvious trend we named Fad Fatigue.
To illustrate how prevalent this has become, it is fitting that we should start with one of the industries that has consistently brought us a stream of fads: home fitness.
Fitness Fads
Like many people, I own a house filled with the remnants of failed fitness ambitions. I have a “twist board,” which was supposed to tone my obliques, and a GRIPMASTER finger exercise tool to improve my grip strength for playing guitar. The intense P90x DVD set sits nearly untouched next to a DVD player that also rarely sees any use. Over the past few years, I have picked up stretch bands, foam rollers, and plenty of fitness tracking watches that run out of battery long before I’m able to use them consistently to track my health. And I’m not alone. The fitness equipment market alone is estimated to reach $12 billion by the year 2022,[39] and it is highly likely that much of that growth will come from replacing dormant at-home exercise devices and buying into quirky workout concepts.
While today, the Internet and social media seem to accelerate the spread of fitness fads, the truth is, they have been around since before many people reading this book were born. For example, earlier this year, USA Today published a fun article entitled “The Biggest Exercise Fad the Year You Were Born.”[40] In my birth year, the “Leg Beauty Kit,” a set of rubber resistance bands marketed to women to slim and tone their legs, ruled the day. It was followed a year later the by rise of “speed bag training.” No doubt inspired by the release of the movie Rocky, men flocked to boxing gyms to get their arms in movie-star shape. The rest of the article highlights fads so outlandish, it seems inconceivable they were ever popular in the first place (e.g., the Thighmaster!).
The craze for new fitness ideas continues today, and they include everything from Parkour gyms (inspired by reality shows like American Ninja Warrior) and goat yoga, the practice of having baby goats climb on you while you do yoga poses. In case you’re curious about the rationale for the latter, it is because (according to one expert) “it is impossible to be sad and depressed when you have goats around you.”[41]
Goat Yoga Session, 2018 (Photo Credit: Central Washington University, Flickr)[42]
Clearly the fitness industry relies on fads. To be fair, part of the reason they work so well in this industry is because each new product or exercise craze offers something new to try, which has the positive side effect of giving people novelty as a tool for personal motivation to continue with their exercise regimen.
It also means no single product will last for very long reality the industry has embraced out of necessity, continually scrambling to launch new products before their customers discard the old ones. In a fad-driven industry, no one makes any money if you just stick to push-ups and squat jumps.
Healthy Food Fads & Unusual Nutrition
It is a modern culinary tragedy that cauliflower is having its moment.[43]
My statement might be a bit biased. As some of my regular readers know, I am the self-appointed “Despiser-in-Chief” of cauliflower. Everything from its disgusting shape to its noxious smell has led to my longstanding disbelief that any non-starving human would willingly eat it. I have to admit that these days, my personal “cauliphobia,” as I have sometimes called it, makes me an outlier. Cauliflower is now being mashed, riced, roasted, used as gluten-free pizza crust, and even turned into “cauliflower steaks.” Yuck!
Yet for all the attention this horrible cruciferous vegetable is receiving right now, I can take solace in the fact that history suggests the attention won’t last for long. When it comes to healthy food, as with fitness, our attention wanders frequently. Although some nutrition movements are rightly considered trends—like the shift away from eating meat and overly processed foods—many food manias around ingredients only enjoy their time in the spotlight for a short while. Quinoa, kale, sweet potato, and beets have all had their moments. And then they simply become ordinary ingredients once more. The one area of nutrition fads that accurately mirrors what has happened in fitness involves highly unusual items.
Today, there are plenty of news stories about the wonderous health benefits of activated charcoal (it traps toxins and chemicals in the gut, preventing their absorption!), algae capsules (boost your brainpower and prevent heart disease!), and acacia fiber (relieves pain and reduces fat!).
Some of these may well be real miracle treatments. Unfortunately, we are given so much conflicting advice, fueled by get-rich-quick online marketers and “advice” websites, that most of us end up completely confused. All the uncertainty that this Fad Fatigue trend describes is creating a golden opportunity for the few organizations that are able to tell a more concrete and authentic story to sustain their new product or service in the minds of customers, and rise above the here today, gone tomorrow bias affecting everyone else.
Why People Don’t Trust Science, Either
The comedy site Funny or
Die captures this dynamic in a hilarious video about a “Time-Traveling Dietician.” In the video, a dietician goes back to the 70s to warn an unsuspecting couple about all the developments and health discoveries made by scientists in the future. Every minute, he comes back with a conflicting piece of advice: don’t eat eggs. Only eat the egg whites. Eggs are fine. Don’t eat red meat. Eat lots of protein. Don’t eat bread. Eat whatever, because the only thing that matters is genetics.
It is funny because it’s true. The science around food and what we should or shouldn’t eat seems to change daily, making us weary of all food claims in general—especially diets.
Our skepticism about which food health claims to believe or ignore is exacerbated by the fact that much of the justification for them—like the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet or intermittent fasting—rests on the fact that our ancestors ate that way (or didn’t eat at all–though probably not voluntarily, in their case). The fact is, many of these diets may be effectivand almost of their arguments seem plausible. But there isn’t always consensus in the medical research to support their claims. So who do we believe?
Complicating matters further is the tendency of many media outlets to take a small finding from a scientific research paper and sensationalize its implications in a link-baiting headline:” Chemical in McDonald’s Fries Could Cure Baldness, Study Says!”[44] and “Drinking Too Much Coffee ‘Could Shrink Women’s Breasts.”[45]
Non-Obvious 2019- How To Predict Trends and Win The Future Page 11