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Marketing Trends In Bangladesh That Will Dominate 2019: Perspectives From Industry Leaders

We recently interviewed four distinguished industry leaders on the growing marketing trends that will influence and eventually dominate 2019 in Bangladesh.

We recently interviewed four distinguished industry leaders on the growing marketing trends that will influence and eventually dominate 2019 in Bangladesh.

Farzanah Chowdhury, CEO & Managing Director at Green Delta Insurance

Marketing is a contemporary study that keeps evolving continuously. As such, marketing trends have been changing drastically over time as consumer behaviour keeps changing. Consumers’ daily lifestyle and their social values and habits have a significant impact on concurrent marketing trends. Under the light of recent consumer behaviour, few notable marketing trends that would have a significant impact in shaping the markets are as follows:

Augmented reality is the new big thing. As per recent trends, which social media application ruled in the last few years or made a huge impact on teenagers around the world? Any tech-savvy person nowadays would know the answer.

While Snapchat tops the list for the whole world, TikTok isn’t much far behind considering the numbers of downloads, especially in Asia. Both apps use augmented reality in a very smart way. These apps also allow making things interesting for social media users. In the case of Snapchat, the filters make this thing really appealing to teenagers. On the other hand, TikTok allows users to lip-sing and act on preloaded audio contents that are merged together to make new content. Both apps actually use augmented reality to deliver the features that have made these apps so popular.

On another note, the mobile game Pokémon was also a mega hit back in 2016-17. This app also teaches us how to interact with people with a game aligning the real world, which also employs augmented reality. This augmented reality will rule the digital content in the near future as well.

Native advertising is overpowering traditional marketing. Advertisers are always in a cycle of advertising segmentation as they have decent advertising tools and guides to follow. ‘Native advertising’ is one of the things that allows you to play with your advertising brain for better promotion. Big brands like Apple and Microsoft are really great examples of native advertising.

The rationale is pretty simple: why would you spend millions on tradition marketing where smart marketing moves may bump up your product’s sales ratio! The impact of native advertising is really long lasting as people will always remember what they read/view by clicking the link/image.

Mobile friendly content is the king again. Your device determines what you want to watch! Definitely, you want to argue that, but social media and applications circulate contents according to the device’s specification. That means, if you have a smartphone with Android operating system, you will able to watch android related content (advertisements on Android operating system/smartphone product) on the smartphone. The same thing is true for iOS users. Typically, iOS users have been considered the ‘High-end’ or ‘luxury goods’ users. That means, your iOS device will show you those specific ads which are usually considered as a premium product.

Social media will be flooded with motion graphic and video. Video content has been ruling the social media homepages since 2017/18. Most of the viral contents have been coming to a video or animated format. This thing will also be applicable for this year too. You, your friends and brand pages will not stop posting video content as this content does a much better job than static posts in ensuring maximum reach. Other than that, webisodes will also be the noticeable factors in the digital marketing world this year. Digital content makers are trying to make interesting webisodes as it gets the maximum views on online site.

Back to basics – SMS and email marketing. Mobile phones have become a staple tool for our everyday lives. A lot of SMS marketing and e-mail marketing solutions are available at a cheap rate with the scope of different types of focused targeting including geo-targeting, SEC based targeting, etc. As such, both SMS marketing and e-mail marketing would keep on being mainstream advertising mediums, given that both mediums are cheap, precise and easy ways to reach the target customers.

Data science and artificial intelligence. At present, data science have been gaining traction due to its application in uncovering consumer behaviour, trending contents, customer preferences as well as their exposure to different media or content platforms. Given that, it is the age of accountability and as corporates are very careful and calculative about ensuring effective marketing by reaching to their target customers precisely and efficiently, data science would gradually become the base of digital marketing in the near future. At the same time, increasing usage of AI in data sciences and different applications to observe customers’ behaviours are very notable in recent years.

So, it can be said with confidence that artificial intelligence would become a mainstream tool in marketing analytics in the near future.

Mahzabin Ferdous, Head of Brand & Corporate Communication at IPDC Finance Limited

Heard earned placement of a long dear campaign can act like that of a dream. Just how a dream can feel so real or heart wrenching at times, however, the moment when reality hits after the alarm, it just fades with the regular errands or even better stories perhaps.

Considering this super-competitive environment, there is a greater need to adopt a more data-driven analysis approach to be able to make better-informed and strategic concepts. With the price hike of advertising on social media despite the alarming irrelevant Bangladeshi audience group prevailing there, online and social media platforms will continue to become stronger in supporting businesses across sectors and scales. Both platforms will not replace conventional marketing platforms but will complement each other.

Despite being more social, paradoxically, individualism will emerge as a stronger personality trait among the Gen Z and hence, familiarity in communication is preferred over the overuse of fantasy.

Today, the personality of the marketer happens to be an important metric for the consumers beyond the offer he/she communicates. Hence, personal branding is on the rise. A visible, vibrant relatable face goes hand in hand with organisational branding.

Nevertheless, the metric of good quality is the customer experience (or CX) throughout all customer touch-points and journey. This is the new way to maintain customer repeat purchase with stronger and loyal customer relationships. ‘Right here, right now, and personalized’ is the mantra to achieve enhanced customer experience. Hence, leaders today need to have an entrepreneurial marketer approach to be more proactive in this very dynamic business landscape.

No longer a marketer’s role is confined to a spender but has evolved as a problem-solving and revenue generating centre. The trend now is to have leaders who are very close to the customer to innovate and evolve from time to time which makes CMOs the ideal candidate for the next generation of organizational leadership, perhaps the CEO.

Sayma Rahman, Head of Retail Partnership at GrameenPhone

With the surge of smartphones and internet penetration in Bangladesh, the marketing landscape has changed tremendously. I’ll touch upon 3 trends that we should definitely embrace in 2019:

Contextual Marketing and Hyper-Personalisation. Generally, marketing messages have 8 seconds to capture and hold the user’s attention. We only notice an ad when it is personalized, with our names, in a local language, at the right location and time, offering us exactly what we’ve been looking for!

In Hyper Personalization, contextual communication has gone one step further where offers are made instantly based on real-time data leaving the consumers with a feeling of déjà vu. 75% of consumers will be more likely to make a purchase if the brand makes personalized offerings. Tech/Telecommunication organizations in Bangladesh are heavily personalizing to make communications effective, simple and more successful.

Micro Influencer Marketing. Influencer marketing has been successful, especially on Instagram, making it over a billion dollar industry. However, research has found that accounts with 30K or fewer followers, the micro influencers, are more beneficial for brands.

Micro influencers have higher engagements, are more trusted sources of recommendations, more relatable and are personally invested in their crafts. On top of everything, they are more cost effective. There is a growing community of local micro influencers, although none of the big brands has properly utilised them in Bangladesh.

Content Marketing. If you’re into food products business, a simple content marketing can be to invite popular chefs and share their recipes on your blog to attract a large number of foodies. However, in 2019, content marketing is taking an advanced shape with the rapid growth of videos and voice search feature.

With the increasing popularity of Google Home and Amazon Alexa, Voice Search will continue to grow and marketers need to optimize their contents for voice search. At the same time, contents need to be available on multiple channels for different segments of consumers.

Lusbun Uditi, Director – Marketing & Communication at Chaldal

Representing the 36% of the country’s workforce, women have been the key drivers of development in Bangladesh. The internet has played a great role in this regard. Previously, women were considered to be less tech-savvy than men but this trend is changing over time.

The data-driven marketing has brought a paradigm shift from the old practice of ‘push sales’. Information sharing was never this easy before and maintaining sales update is a few clicks away. In short, marketing is not an old man’s sector anymore and creative content with proper data support is taking over the marketing industry of Bangladesh.

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Written By

Rahnama is a journalist based in Dhaka, working on a freelancing basis for a few organisations. Follow her on LinkedIn.

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