Top 5 marketing trends to watch out for in 2017: Krishna Rao, Parle

Krishna Rao, Category Head, Parle Products, lists the top five trends that will dominate the marketing landscape in 2017, which include continued focus on rural areas, growing march of social videos, and rise of unique content, among others. 

Rural growth will continue to boost FMCG sales: Rural growth is expected to continue even in 2017. With government schemes like NREGA and Jan Dhan Yojna and better monsoons predicted for the year, rural consumers are expected to have more disposable income on their hands, spurring more sales of FMCG products. In order to capitalise on this, marketers will continue to focus on the rural markets as one of their key target segments. 

Increase in cashless transactions: The impact of the demonetisation policy is expected to continue even in 2017. One of the major outcomes of this has been a marked jump in cashless transactions. We have seen many wholesalers and retailers adopting cashless methods in order to reduce the effect of the strain on paper money. In 2017, we will see this translate into brands and corporates promoting cashless transactions increasingly. 

Social videos transforming digital marketing: Digital marketing came, it saw, it conquered. However, that is a story few years old. Social videos are the new spin on digital marketing, using social media as a broadcast tool, and is taking digital marketing to the next level. Many brands and marketers are focussing on quality content over quantity to build an emotional and social connect with their audience. Social videos are enjoying considerable growth as an innovative marketing genre and are expected to take off in 2017. 

Rise of unique content: Given how digital platforms, digital content and on-demand content have exploded and gained popularity across age-groups, creating unique marketing content for these portals and channels is the new ask. Brand associations with digital platform celebrities/ groups and working with them to integrate unique content centred on the product/ brand is another trend to watch out for in 2017. A growing number of brands are also experimenting with live video for content that is exclusive, newsworthy or requires live audience involvement. 

Influx of e-commerce marketing: E-commerce has been slowly building in urban markets and in the past few years we have seen a number of online food retailers spring up. The last two months of 2016 saw a huge shift towards e-commerce, following the demonetisation, where people have begun buying even simple every-day products from e-commerce portals. As the online shopping trend continues to grow, marketers will begin focussing a fair bit of efforts and resources on e-commerce marketing in 2017.