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Guiding you through the ever changing world of communications

2011 saw a plethora of changes to consumer buying habits and a multitude of new communications platforms blossom, offering us more opportunities than ever to creatively engage with our audiences.

The year ahead will be no different, and we curious folk at Finn have taken the liberty to look ahead and pull together the must-know trends. In this edition of Beacon, we look at the hottest technologies, the latest consumer quirks and give you a slice of insight about the campaigns, tools and news that have turned us on this year.

2012 Trends

Mood Food

Food can make us happy, ener-gised or even make us more pas-sionate in the bedroom, but it doesn’t stop there. New develop-ments in science are revealing that everything we eat has the potential to change the way we think and feel. Next generation foods will be tailored to meet the needs and the desires of an individual consumer, whether they want to be woken up, cheered up or chilled out. Accord-ing to online food resource Food & Drink Towers, 44 per cent of industry experts believe mood foods will in-crease in market value, with happi-ness and stress foods expected to be the main areas of growth.

Health & Wellbeing

Health and wellness has long since been a driving factor on food in-novation and research by Deloitte found that 77 per cent of top manu-facturers, retailers and food service providers thought it would be the primary trend shaping our palettes in 2012. More than half of shoppers are likely to read the food label be-fore buying a product, so expect more active promotion of health benefits on shelf. The quest for ‘five portions a day’ is alive and kicking and remains the message that reso-nates most strongly with consumers. This, coupled with tough new regu-lations, especially on childhood di-ets, means that health will continue to be top of the consumer agenda this year.

The World’s Local Larder

The UK is one of the more gastro-nomically adventurous nations, and this year will be no exception, with Peruvian cuisine likely to hit the mainstream. However, when we’re not chowing down on Cevi-che, we’re likely to be going local in an attempt to reduce our environ-mental footprint, with authenticity, provenance and localness being the most important factors influ-encing food choice. Leatherhead Food Research, a global food re-search company, actually predicts a blending of these two trends, with consumers demanding internation-ally local ingredients. A food’s origin will increasingly become a mark of quality, so expect to see the likes of Madagascan vanilla become pop-ular. Functional Food

Functional food, those that come with added health claims, will in-creasingly line our grocery shelves in 2012. Why? It’s an age thing. The ag-ing Baby Boomer generation, who form the largest group of influencers in the food sector, will take an active interest in maintaining a healthy, ac-tive lifestyle as they hit retirement. We can expect to spot more products with glucosamine to help strength-en joints and omega-3 to improve brain health and help reduce heart disease.

Food

Real-Time Consumer Data

2012 will be the year that real-time online decision-making comes of age. People are increasingly shar-ing everything they do, buy, watch, listen to and read, in real time, whether that’s through Twitter, Tumblr or social apps on Facebook (think Spotify and The Guardian). For busi-nesses, this means a big opportuni-ty to align themselves more closely with the needs of their customers. The challenge for marketeers is to make sense of this data mass and use it to make quick, smart business decisions, identifying and predict-ing upcoming trends to capitalise on them.

CSR

Ethical business is now expected and consumers are increasingly looking for community benefits when making purchasing decisions. The Food & Drinks sector is one of the most scrutinised industries, and it’s brands that offer that feel-good factor that seem to be leading the way. Take Innocent for example, who’s whole business strategy is built around sustainability and fair-ness - sustainable nutrition, ingredi-ents, packaging, production and profit sharing. However, it doesn’t stop at food and drink; those that go beyond simple ethical claims gen-erally outperform their peers. Last year’s World’s Most Ethical awards honourees generated on average 30 per cent greater returns than other publically owned companies.

Corporate Volunteerism

The value that volunteering adds to the UK economy is in excess of £21.5billion and increasingly, busi-nesses are playing a vital part as it becomes more central to the CSR mix. Despite the financial climate, volunteerism, particularly stemming from business initiatives is on the up and it’s increasingly done on a na-tional scale. This year, spending cuts within charities, the government’s Big Society vision and the 2012 Lon-don Olympics, a huge undertaking that will require up to 70,000 volun-teers, are all likely to give the sector a boost.

Random Acts of Kindness

Increasingly open communications between brands and consumers mean it’s simple to surprise and de-light your fans with a relevant ges-ture to brighten their day, help them celebrate or thank them for their opinion. Social media has prompt-ed a lot of free brand-to-fan love, but the power behind RAK is in its selectivity. Last year, one of the most talked about brands was Interflora, who scoured the internet for those having a bad day and offered to send them a bunch of flowers. How-ever, the prediction for 2012 is that campaigns will have to become more complex and personalised in order to provide that level of cut-through and talkability.

01 Finn PR 2012

Corporate

Super Premium

Despite ever tightening pockets, UK food lovers still like to treat them-selves with posh nosh from time to time. This year will see a divergence in food purchasing habits, with con-sumers looking to the extremes of both discount and super-premi-um products, with centre ground brands feeling the squeeze. A pre-mium treat can be justified as an affordable indulgence, particularly if it includes a feel-good health ben-efit and we’re likely to see this trend extend to 2012 and beyond. And If you don’t believe us, you may want to note the success of Heston’s pre-mium Christmas pud that flew off Waitrose’s shelves over the festive period.

Social Commerce

Social Commerce is about consum-ers using peer recommendations to make purchases through social media, whether these be ratings, reviews or comments. For brands, it means harnessing the power of word of mouth to drive purchases and includes everything from group buying and check-in rewards on Foursquare, to selling limited edition products through a Facebook shop. 2011 saw some of the more daring brands experiment with social sell-ing, such as Starbucks and ASOS, but as user recommendations and reviews increase their influence on consumer behaviour, social com-merce will stop being a “nice to have” and will start to fuel sales volumes on a par with traditional channels.

DIY Health

Who needs professional health ad-vice when there’s an app for that? Do it Yourself Health will naturally be driven by technology in 2012, with novel apps and quirky devices in-creasingly letting consumers track, manage and improve their health themselves. Apple’s App Store cur-rently offers 9,000 mobile health apps and by mid-2012, this number is expected to reach 13,000. One of our personal favourites is the Skin Scan app, which helps early identifi-cation of malignant moles.

Stay at Home Dads

This budding set of home bodies is one to watch, particularly if you work in the food, beverage and FMCG sectors. Research by Aviva re-ports that there are now 1.4m stay at home dads in the UK, 10 times as many than a decade ago, with one in seven fathers now the main childcare provider. The trend has been driven by increasing numbers of women earning more than their partners and reflects changing at-titudes amongst couples, with more men able to relinquish their the role as family breadwinner and instead take on more work in the home.

Near Field Communications

Soon every mobile device will come equipped to handle Near Field Communications (NFC), a technol-ogy that allows consumers to per-form seamless, no-nonsense trans-actions and exchange information wirelessly. Early use of NFC has been about streamlining the shopping ex-perience, such as a Starbucks app that allows consumers to snap up coffees through phones pre-loaded with credit, and a register-free eBay shop where bargain-hungry bid-ders snap up deals with their smart phones. However, being marketers, we’re also excited about the possi-bilities for NFC to be used to push deals, coupons and messages to consumers’ smart phones at rele-vant times and locations.

Smart Phones

Up until recently sky high prices have kept the majority of the popu-lation out of the smart phone mar-ket but thanks to the emergence of cheaper models, penetration has more than doubled in the UK over the last two years. This year usage is predicted to reach a tipping point, with 50 per cent of consumers ex-pected to own a smart phone by the end of the year.

For marketeers, mobile was once a way to reach those influencers that stayed ahead of the curve, but as mobile devices become an ever more common touch point be-tween brands and every day con-sumers, there’s much more motiva-tion for brands to invest in mobile technology and campaigns.

Open Graph

Facebook’s Open Graph is a set of programming tools that make con-nections between Facebook and external objects on the web. On one level, it lets you take Facebook’s social experience and integrate it within your website. Even more excit-ing is its ability to take the platform’s rich social data and turn it into a personalised web experience. The thing to watch out for in 2012 is its addition of social actions over and above the now ubiquitous ‘like’, such as reading, writing and watch-ing, that will allow more dynamic content sharing through the new Timeline profile.

Lifestyle

Finn PR 2012 02

Gamification

Gamification has evolved from buz-zword to viable online strategy and it’s now being tipped as one of the top tech trends for 2012. Based on the idea that rewards are crucial in creating an engaging digital experi-ence, the phenomenon involves en-gaging people by applying game mechanics, for example use of level progression, leaderboards, badges and achievements, in an online business environment. It all started with Foursquare’s check-in based badge system, but we’ve seen other innovative incarnations of late, such as Samsung Nation, a game-based website that allows users to earn points and progress by reviewing products, watching videos and par-ticipating in user-generated Q&As.

Digital

2012 Trends

03 Finn PR 2012

In 2012, 23 per cent of the UK’s population will be over 60. The sig-nificance of this statistic is that the baby boomer generation is reach-ing retirement, meaning that many of tomorrow’s pensioners will be more well informed, well educated, health conscious, and discerning than their predecessors. They’ll exer-cise twice as much as the previous generation and more will continue to work. These seniors are interested in successful ageing, extending their middle years by maintaining a healthy, active lifestyle, sparking demand for products and environ-ments that accommodate their changing physical and sensory ca-pabilities.

We’ve already explored Near Field Communications (NFC) and it’s that very technology that’s contributing to what is fast becoming a cash-less society. It’s not that far away. We’re serious! The initial lure of this system is convenience and speed, but it will eventually open up a whole new world of payments, rewards and targeted, real time offers. We’ve followed this trend for a while and it’s been a slow burner as the technology has been gradually made affordable and available. While 2012 will not be the year that the UK adopts cashless paying en masse, we’ll see big boys such as Google, Mastercard and Paypall roll out cashless initia-tives worldwide.

While traditional coupons are considered tired, outdated, and cumbersome, and bar-gain hunting was once something to hide, new and innovative uses of online deals, dis-counts and coupons are driving a new and affluent breed of hagglers to seek out the best prices in 2012 and beyond. Consumer attitudes are shifting in a big way, and such frugalicious behaviour is now considered smart, admirable and dare we say it, darn right cool. The lure of attractive online tech-nologies touting deals will ensure this is a big trend in 2012, with 9.2 million consumers expected to use online coupons throughout the year. That’s a helluva lot of savings!

The mass of data readily available online, particular-ly through social media, has driven a mega trend in personalisation. Custom made, personalised goods and services are growing in popularity among consumers who desire completely individualized products and services, blending creativity with pur-chasing power. Everything from customised online experiences, to personalised gifts, to large, custom built creations. Early instigators this year include Toy-ota, which is encouraging fans to create bespoke music videos alongside their ad campaign’s pup-pet characters, and airline KLM, which is letting pas-sengers choose who sit next to them based on their social media compatibility.

Collaborative consumption describes an emerging economic model based not on ownership, but on sharing, swapping, bor-rowing and renting access to products and services. If it all sounds grubby and socialis-tic, it’s not. It’s set to be one of the hottest and far reaching trends of 2012 and is reinvent-ing not just what we consume but how we consume it. We’ve already seen it permeate emerging sectors such as social lending (check out Zopa if you’re short on cash!), ac-commodation (with peer-to-peer travel pro-vider CouchSurfing) and car sharing (Zip-car), and you can expect a raft of imitators in 2012.

2012 Consumer

Amongst 2012’s utopian vision of collabora-tion, gamification and random acts of kindness, there’s still an ever present undercurrent of auster-ity looming large. Research shows that the num-ber of British shoppers that feel they have little or no spare cash has reached an all time high at 32 per cent. The average family has around £2,000 less disposable income than in previous years. 71 per cent have changed their shopping habits and 65 per cent of these have switched to cheaper grocery brands, an acceptable com-promise that is set to continue even as financial pressure eases.

Finn PR 2012

Today’s consumer typically looks to Google before hitting the shops, a trend that has significantly contributed to the decline of the British high street. While total growth in online retailing slowed to eight per cent last year, there are now an estimated 37m regular online shoppers in the UK. What we also saw was massive growth amongst the under 45s who have adopted it as their primary purchasing point, a sign that internet shopping is reaching maturity. This year we’ll see con-sumers embrace online shopping in new and innovative ways, such as through social commerce, mobile coupons and daily deals, which should breathe further life into the channel.

You’ve heard about crowdsourcing, employing the collective wisdom of consumers to help de-sign products, create content or solve business problems, but democratic buying takes things one step further. It bases product design and produc-tion entirely on the votes of the crowd. Take shop-ping website Shopping Forecast as an example. It lets you view, comment, vote on and share next season’s styles, with votes on each item affecting where and in what volume the piece appears in stores.

The democratic buyer is not a passive voice amongst the throng of the bazaar, but an active contributor to the market place. Expect their voic-es to be heard loud and proud this year!

With group buying, there truly is strength in numbers. Last year, group buying took off in a big way through sites like Grou-pon, LivingSocial and MyCityDeal, who began offering huge discounts on prod-ucts once a certain number of people signed up. Brands got on the bandwagon too, with campaigns like Innocent’s Tweet and Eat, which unlocked bigger and big-ger discounts as more people tweeted a hashtag. This year, we expect much more emphasis on geo-located deals through mobile devices, market consolidation as consumers develop preferred group buy-ing brands, and expansion into other sec-tors, as media providers and others get on board.

Over recent years, our ailing economy has ac-celerated the trend for locally sourced food, as consumers seek to support the economy and local communities. In December last year, over half of shoppers claimed to buy local products to support local producers, a quarter to sup-port local retailers, and over a fifth to keep jobs in their area. Supporting British producers has now become the most important ethical con-cern for grocery shoppers, with more than four in ten consumers intending to buy more locally sourced goods this year.

Tightening pockets and the growing in-fluence of cookery programmes will fuel a growing interest in entertaining in the home, with consumers investing more time and effort into meal times to add fun and theatre to the ordinary work-ing week. Original recipes and unusual ingredients will be the focus for home-cooks in 2012, who will be influenced by TV, foodie magazines, websites, social networks and Smartphone apps.

Forget the regular weekly shop. Rather than stocking up on all the essentials, grocery shoppers are in-creasingly hitting the stores on nar-rowly focused missions. They may be looking for a specific meal, they may have run out of something, or could just be hungry for a snack. Shop-ping has not completely become a spontaneous activity and the majority employ some form of plan-ning beforehand, such as making a list, devising recipe solutions and looking for deals, but we could see a shift from category management to mission management as retailers and brands seek out ways to capi-talise on the trend.

2012 Consumer 04

Alongside the renaissance in high quality home dining, consumers will also look to ex-tend this premium food experience outside the home. Despite anxieties over the econo-my, many commentators suggest that where there are cutbacks elsewhere in the house-hold budget, eating out will remain central to our lives. Dining out used to be a special oc-casion, but research has shown that it’s now considered a regular treat. 70 per cent of us now claim to visit a restaurant at least once a month and the market is expected to grow six per cent to reach £36.6bn this year. Increasing-ly social media will lead decision making, with location-based deals, mobile couponing and group buying discounts dictating where peo-ple eat. Who said it was all doom and gloom?

LinkedIn

Facebook

Twitter

Youtube

Foursquare

Flickr

UK Social Media Landscape Finn PR 201205

Finn PR 2012 06Things To Look Out For In 2012

Why do brands use Facebook? Generally because of its potential as a viral medium, its propensity to allow dialogue with consumers and increasingly, its ability to house apps that provide engaging, interactive content. We’re now also seeing F-Commerce, the act of selling products through Face-book, start to take off in a big way. This year we’ve learnt that Facebook is a great place to trial ex-clusive or new products. Heinz sold limited edition ketchup with balsamic vinegar through its page, creating a lot of talkability; and more recently, Magners started selling limited edition cider through its page. However, the primary goal behind these campaigns is to drive advocacy and conversa-tion, rather than large sales volumes. There is mounting evidence to suggest that F-commerce is already a viable retail platform. Around 50,000 retailers have opened an F-store through the e-commerce platform Payvment and 75 per cent of retail-ers plan to use Facebook for social commerce in the future. The top three brands on Facebook (Coca Cola, Starbucks and Disney) all sell directly through the medium and have reported healthy sales figures. Over 1m Star-bucks users are using the brand’s e-commerce enabled Facebook loyalty program and over 5,000 used Walmart’s group-buy Facebook app on the day of its launch. The jury is out as to whether the average consumer is ready to adopt Facebook as a mainstream buying medium and it will be up to brands to provide compelling reasons to use the medium over others in 2012.

F-Commerce

Will 2012 mark the tipping point for QR codes? They were everywhere last year – on products, posters, in magazines and shops – but questions still remained about their usage and value. A study late last year found that de-spite their ubiquity as a marketing tool, only a third of consumers knew what one was and how to scan one, but it’s still early days for this technology. The beauty of QR codes is that they enable brands to provide something exclusive to smart phone users with the knowledge to use them, but up un-til now, they have largely been used as URL alternatives, driving consumers to brand homepages. A novel way to drive traffic, but hardly revolutionary! However, we did start to see evidence of brands starting to use them to add real value to the consumer experience. We saw Tesco create a QR code store in a Korean subway that saved time for busy commuters; Heinz used QR codes to let Americans show their appreciation to their troops by leaving them personalised messages; and Victoria’s Secret launched a naughty billboard campaign with QR codes covering the modesty of nearly nude models. Phew! With smart phone usage expected to surpass 50 per cent of the population this year, there’s a real possibility that the creative use of QR codes will become a real value driver in the world of mobile marketing, so get your thinking caps on!

QR Codes

How many of you have ever Facebooked while watching X Factor? Or Tweeted your opinion during Question Time? Chances are you have. In fact, 44 per cent of UK consumers say they use social networks to enhance their TV viewing. These days, the majority of prime time television shows already have their own hash-tag to group together social media discussions and many programmes, particularly faux reality shows like TOWIE, have their par-ticipants tweet during air time to engage with fans. Whilst television owner-ship is in decline, ratings for live entertainment are creeping ever higher as viewers look to watch in real-time so that they interact socially through these channels. Up until recently, social media and television have been separate mediums that just happen to be complementary, but we’re now seeing the first forays into a fully immersive social TV experience, with second screen apps such as Unami and Zeebox (which you’ll learn more about later) being released for the iPad. For those with smart TVs (TVs with online tech-nology), the possibility of having all this interaction all in one place will be-come a reality over the coming months and make sure to keep an eye out for Apple, as its launch of a television set this year could signal a complete reinvention of the concept.

Social TV

An homage to the old Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras, Instagram is a free app that allows users to take photos, add quick stylistic fixes like vintage hues and dream-like blurs, and then share them instantly with their social network. You’ve probably heard about it, the chances are you’ve used it or at least spotted a photo run through one of its array of filters. It was iPhone’s app of 2011, currently boasts 14 million users and before its year anniver-sary, a whopping 150 million photos had been uploaded. Its popularity is undisputed, but why do we think it rose to fame and why should you keep an eye on it in 2012? We put its success down to a winning combination of quality, ease of use and people’s never ending appetite for sharing their lives visually. Essentially, it gives a mass of casual photographers the ability to produce images with some sort of artistic merit without the need for any professional design skills, and at the click of a but-ton, lets them share it amongst their peer groups to garner instant gratifica-tion and admiration. We think this is just the tip of a booming mobile photo sharing trend, and the increasing prevalence of high megapixel smartphones amongst the population is only going to throw further fuel to the fire. Last year, the app made its first hint at welcoming brands by introducing a hashtag fea-ture for grouping content, but we wouldn’t be surprised if additional cam-paign-friendly features are added in 2012.

Instagram

A suitably strategic topic for the boss, Rich explores the quandary of social media meas-urement and our fixation with big numbers, whether this is reach, impressions, clicks or fol-lowers. In the social space, this fixation can lead to a skewed view of success, so in his post, he argues the case for digital communications to be measured for quality, depth and nature of engagement

http://bit.ly/bnsyndrome

3,2,1 Share

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Greg attended a Geo-location lunch as part of Leeds Digital Festival and that got him thinking about, you guessed it, Geo-location. He explores the past, present and future of the technology, focusing on the countless opportunities there are for brands in this space.

http://bit.ly/geofuture

James likes grandiose ideas, so it’s no surprise his topic of choice is “one idea that will change the world”. He takes a look in more detail at the trend, or rather the revolutionary movement that is Collaborative Consumption. He muses over some of the most successful organisations that are facilitating this new economic model and how all this swapping and trading is affecting us

http://bit.ly/collabconsumption

Jessica illustrated the mega trend of customi-zation by looking at two stand-out campaigns launched last year: Heinz’s Get Well Soup campaign in which the brand gave its 80k Fa-cebook fans the chance to send personalised cans of soup to their friends; and Nivea’s Christ-mas campaign that allowed fans to send gift sets enveloped in wrapping paper made from their friends’ pictures.

http://bit.ly/customking

A lover of all things social, Chris drills down into the emerging world of social television, explor-ing the recently launched free iPod app Zeebox, which works in tandem with Facebook and Twit-ter to let TV chatterboxes get together around programmes they are watching, and even feeds them relevant content about the people, places and products they see on screen.

http://bit.ly/zeebox

We love the idea of marrying brands with culture to create credibility. Tom spotted an innovative campaign by Volkswagen Canada called ‘The Great Volkswagen Art Heist’, which effortlessly blends art, ambient activity and social media to create truly talkable content.

http://bit.ly/artheist

Rachel explores the continuing progression of digital magazines. She takes a look at a new food trade title, Encounter Magazine, and uses it as a vehicle to weigh up the pros and cons of magazines moving into the digital space and the opportunities for brands to gain added value in this new environment.

http://bit.ly/digimags

Always the joker, Janelle took to a clever tongue in cheek campaign from Kellogg’s Rice Crispie Squares. Based on the idea that Rice Krispie Squares are in fact rectangular not square, the brash campaign catches people’s attention with outrageous lies, subverting the conventions of traditional advertising while poking fun at the industry.

http://bit.ly/squarelies

Sophie dug up a fantastically useful iPhone app called ‘Can I Eat It’. It allows food conscious consumers to upload their dietary preferences, whether allergies, lifestyle choices or dislikes, and use it to check the appropriateness of products by scanning the barcode. A genius choice for those on a January health drive!

http://bit.ly/canieatit

At the end of each month, we like to take the time to relax with a glass of wine and present each other the content, ideas and campaigns that have been catching our attention. A show and tell of sorts, it’s rather like being back in primary school, in a good way.

3, 2, 1 Share is three slides and two minutes on one topic area and in this final section, we’d like to give you some insight into the topics we’ve been pondering over. Below you’ll find a teaser on each Finnster’s latest loved topic and if you’re eager to find out more you can follow the QR code or URL to a blog post on our website.