Top Marketing Trends for 2009

The Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG), a nearly 2000 member, not-for-profit organization of senior-level marketing professionals across all industries and marketing disciplines, and research firm Anderson Analytics, have issued the results of their second annual survey of Top Marketing Trends for 2009. The survey of MENG members focused on top marketing concepts, buzz words, global areas of opportunity, targeted customer demographics, as well as the books and thought leaders that marketers look to for inspiration and growth opportunity.

A key finding of this year’s survey is that 72% of respondents indicated that innovation efforts would stay the same or increase. This is significant given that most marketing experts agree it’s imperative to innovate during a recession and further exemplifies that MENG members are leaders in their respective industries. It’s also no surprise the economic climate showed greater interest in the survey as more marketers expressed concern on how a recession would impact priorities moving forward. For example, half of executives believe their marketing budgets will be decreased in 2009. However, 56% of marketers indicated their staffing plans will either stay the same or increase.

The top five trends:

--Insight and innovation viewed as keys to combat down economic and business cycles; Marketers indicated market research and development would either stay the same or increase in 2009.

--Customer satisfaction and customer retention remained the top two marketing concepts, followed by marketing ROI, brand loyalty and segmentation, which represents a “Back to Core Principles” approach to marketing. Of the 62 identified marketing concepts, faith-based marketing, six sigma, game theory, anti-Americanism and immigration were viewed as the least important.

--The issue of global warming showed the largest decrease in importance (dropping 14 places in the rankings), while green marketing showed a statistically significant 5% drop.

--Twice as many marketers are “sick” of hearing about Web 2.0 and related buzzwords such as “blogs” and “social networking” compared to last year’s survey; however, marketers still admit they don’t know enough about it. This was evident in the results of a social media study MENG released on November 6, 2008 showing 67% of executive marketers consider themselves beginners when it comes to using social media for marketing purposes.

--Despite well-publicized quality issues over the last year, China ranked the number one greatest area of opportunity for marketers with international responsibility. India was a distant second with only 17% of respondents.

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