8 Marketing Trends You May Not Be Thinking About, but Should Be

While it is buried on a list of eight, this is another take on content marketing.  This may also come under the heading of “Marketing disguised as education.”

4. PROFESSOR BRAND. A growing number of marketers will capture consumer’s fragmented digital learning attention by offering up content that empowers consumers, builds on their sense of self-sufficiency and solidifies the brand’s role as an expert.

“This has tactical and practical application,” Alives said. “It’s an evolution of the idea of brand utility, offering content and services. Here the technology is merging with a brand opportunity. We know that people around the world see the Internet as a how-to personal university, with more platforms with video, for instance, or Google Hangout making the idea of instruction accessible to more people. More brands will capitalize on that.”

As an example, last summer GE hosted a six-second science fair on Vine that churned food coloring, dish soap and milk into a bubbling, mesmerizing kaleidoscope of color and planned to turn the popularity of that video into a longer running production to showoff the wild world of science. In another example, explained in the Upshot report, Bank of America partnered with non-profit Khan Academy, one of the web’s largest online education sites, earlier this year to offer consumers personal finance education via a standalone website called Better Money Habits and promoted it in its bank branches.

“There’s a convergence of behaviors of consumers already going online for how-tos and educational content and brands seeing the opportunity to be there,” she said.

via 8 Marketing Trends You May Not Be Thinking About, but Should Be | Page 2 of 2 | Chief Marketer.

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