Brand Keys Identifies 4 Trends for Marketing in 2022

Brand Keys, a brand loyalty and engagement research consultancy, has used the behavioral and emotional engagement metrics from its Customer Loyalty Engagement Index to identify marketing trends for 2022.

The company turned 25 years worth of data, containing 4.3 million customer loyalty and engagement assessments for 1,624 brands in 142 categories, to identify the following four trends:

1. Consumer foundations for brand engagement, product and service purchase, and brand loyalty will be almost entirely emotional (80 percent emotional and 20 percent rational). Rational aspects for categories and sectors will get filed by consumers under primacy of product or service, and companies will need to know the emotional-rational ratio for values that drive consumer behavior in their categories. To do that, they "will need to acknowledge the difference between emotion and imagery and engagement and entertainment because consumers are going to, advises Robert Passikoff, founder and CEO of Brand Keys.
2. Consumer expectations will increase faster than companies can keep up. Net change since 1997 and 2022 will see a 39 percent cross-category increase in what consumers expect; with social networking and technology closer to a 50 percent increase. Companies only managed to keep up by about 5 percent, creating an even bigger gap between what consumers desire and what companies can deliver, according to Passikoff.
3. Value ownership will be 2022's lock on loyalty and differentiation. Value-ownership today is a brand-state that goes well beyond 20th century differentiation to define category leadership. Companies that can best meet expectations and emotionally engage will survive. But companies that will dominate and own categories will own an emotional value that will differentiate them from their competition, Passikoff says. "Amazon has created a connection fulfilling consumers' needs for immediate gratification. Apple has done it via human connection; Netflix via diversion. Your brand will need to do that too."
4. Brand dominance, profitability, and the ability to own emotionally engaging values and meet consumer expectations will be synergistic, and loyalty will matter more than ever, Passikoff says. In 2022, it will cost 13 to 18 times more to recruit a new customer than to keep an existing one (up 60 percent vs. 1997), according to Brand Keys' research, which also found that an increase in loyalty of 5 percent will increase lifetime profits per customer of as much as 78 percent (up 22 percent), and an increase in customer loyalty of only 2 percent will be equivalent to a 15 percent across-the-board cost reduction program (up 50 percent).

What has not changed? The bottom line is always the bottom line, Passikoff concluded.