The Post-Modern Consumer: Your Guide to Next-Level Marketing

As the year draws to a close, why not take a moment to recap the lessons learned and fuel our growth for 2024?

To say that 2023 has been exciting would be an understatement. While AI has been changing the landscape dramatically, we marketers should not neglect our most precious asset – the consumer. And not just the consumer but the post-modern consumer.

First the pandemic, then the rise of AI impacted customer behaviour greatly, making consumers more digitally savvy but also more cautious, prioritizing value, convenience, authenticity and transparency. As side effects, quality, trust and disinformation issues have emerged. Therefore, creating unique, credible, and customized offerings that suit customers’ changing needs becomes more important than ever in the postmodern era. 

Curious to find out more in order to perfect your strategy for 2024? Dive into our selection of insights curated to help you win:

• Adopt a postmodern marketing approach. Postmodern marketing is inherently focused on customized experiences. Broad market generalizations are no-longer applied or implemented on behalf of branded communications. Instead, the technique requires marketers to remove “new aged adlandia” trends and developments to focus on how the consumer prefers to be messaged to. With a postmodern marketing approach,  one-to-one communication is created between real humans, controlling real mouses, real computers, real keyboards and real mobile telephones.
• Respect your consumers. According to the famous Marketoonist Tom Fishburne , many of the marketing tools, channels, and technology have changed or evolved in the past quarter-century, but the ideal of Permission Marketing is as relevant as ever. He refers to the words of Seth Godin as a guiding rule of thumb: “Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them. It recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention.”

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• Choose a platform with unquestionable integrity. At the end of November 2023, X (former Twitter) came under the spotlight again when Elon Musk said “go f*** yourself” to advertisers who recently paused spending on X after he endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory on the platform. Companies that have paused or pulled advertising on X in the last few weeks include Apple, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, IBM, Paramount Global, Lionsgate and the European Commission. 

A platform’s ethics and integrity go a long way, and so does the lack thereof. According to Dr. Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy from company Neurons, in an eye-opening study with Ericsson and Vodafone, they discovered a significant “halo effect”: a platform’s negative content can seriously bleed into brand perception. It’s a stark reminder of the associative power of the digital environment on consumer sentiment. 

For further valuable insights on the importance of platform and appropriate context for brand perception, you can also refer to our previous posts here and here.

• Embrace the increased use of technology. According to Sam Izad, CMO and author of “EVOLVE OR DISSOLVE: Postmodern Consumerology!”, customers have become more comfortable using technology for shopping and other activities, such as ordering food delivery or accessing virtual health care services. This trend will likely continue as they become more familiar with these technologies. Additionally, customers may continue to prioritize value and convenience, as many individuals have become more cost-conscious due to the economic impact of the pandemic. Your strategy? It’s getting increasingly important to meet and interact with your consumers where they are – on the go, at their mobile phones, utilizing moments of peak attention during their busy digital lifestyle.
• Foster emotional connections. According to Dr. Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy, emotions are the sticky glue of memory. In the digital age, consumers crave authenticity. Brands need to foster genuine connections, moving beyond mere transactions to build relationships. This means engaging in meaningful conversations and demonstrating a commitment to values that resonate with their audience. Whether it’s humour, nostalgia, or inspiration, an emotional chord ensures your brand stays in the consumer’s heart and mind long after the ad has ended, according to Dr. Ramsøy.
• Don’t worry about ad wear-out. More often than not, marketers run after the shiny and new things, sometimes to the detriment of their budgets and with a doubtful end effect. Choose a different strategy! Multiple studies over the years have proven that good ads don’t wear out, even over repeated exposures. Hershey’s Kisses Christmas ad  is a living proof. In 1989, the Hershey Company began an advertising campaign for their product Hershey’s Kisses, which was referred to as the “whimsy” campaign. The ad has aired each holiday season since 1989, making it the longest running Hershey ad ever. If you are curious about ad efficiency and how strong ads maintain their success over time, you can revisit our previous post  on the subject.

Novelty Media, via SmartAdd, offers an integrative solution built by design to provide 100% predictable context holding no surprises. With us, your ads and content run solely at 4 strictly pre-defined moments of peak attention related to routine smartphone usage. SmartAdd is optimized for video storytelling, which cuts through the noise to capture your busy consumers’ undivided attention. Join our global advertisers who have repeatedly chosen our innovative platform for their content. Experience the difference of a human-centric mobile media channel fully endorsed by Mobile Operators! Contact us to find out more about SmartAdd and the semantics of our solution.