As we round up our exploration into this years top Media Trends, here’s a summary of the trends that your brand should get onboard with to better engage with your consumers and extend your brand’s influence while improving the impact of your marketing presence.

Privacy Matters

In this day and age, our digital footprint has become widely available to most companies and brands that collect our personal data. With so many cookies and trackers monitoring our search history and activity across websites, applications and other platforms, it’s hard to stay anonymous while browsing the web. Have you ever wondered why advertisements displayed to you change after searching a certain keyword? Perhaps, you were looking for a new vacuum cleaner one day and all of a sudden, you are shown the latest model available the next time an ad pops up on your screen.

Although most consumers agree with personalised ads, at the same time, our respondents told us in our latest survey that privacy matters more. 78% claimed that privacy is “very important” to them. Therefore, making sure that your consumers are aware of what personal data is being collected and how you are safeguarding their personal data helps to ease their concerns.

Furthermore, 56% of our consumers reported that they were “not comfortable” with allowing websites to collect and store their personal data. This highlights consumer’s fear of their personal data being abused or misappropriated. In order to alleviate this fear, brands should be more transparent about the data collected and provide an opt-out option to protect consumer privacy.

Improve your brand’s perception

We looked at 3 areas of how brands could promote a positive image to their consumers. With a rise in awareness towards socio-economic issues like sustainability, corporate social responsibility and fair HR practices, consumers want to support brands that not only care about these issues but are at the forefront with initiatives aimed at addressing them.

56% of our respondents reported that a brand’s stance and measures towards ensuring sustainability, in the form of eco-friendliness, using green technologies or cleaner waste was “very important” when it came to their consideration of supporting the brand.

An overwhelming majority of respondents (89%) view brands that donate or collaborate with non-profit organisations and charities more positively. Brands which are viewed as being part of the community, seen giving back by supporting meaningful causes attract consumer’s attention and make them more favourable than those which do not take part in these initiatives.

Internal practices of the brand in the form of promoting diversity, inclusivity and fairness among employees was also deemed important by 78% of our respondents.

More demographic representation in advertising

Only 33% of our respondents claimed that they felt represented “very often” in the advertisements that they saw.

While representation in advertising and media has expanded over the past decade, there is still much more room for improvement. When consumers see relatable portrayals of themselves in advertisements, they are able to engage better and more effectively with the message of the advertisement and even begin imagining themselves using the brand’s product or service.

To learn more about consumer behaviour and trends reach out to us.