LICENSED FOR INDIVIDUAL USE ONLY

Predictions 2019: B2C Marketing

Consumer Power Pushes Marketers To Better Data And Experiences, But Not Without A Few
Fumbles

by Jessica Liu, Emily Collins, Fatemeh Khatibloo, Stephanie Liu, Tina Moffett, Jim Nail, Joe
Stanhope, and Rusty Warner
November 8, 2018

Why Read This Report Key Takeaways

Almost halfway through the age of the customer,
consumers are making their increasing power
felt when dealing with brands. With customer
preference and privacy taking center stage in
2018, B2C marketers have painfully learned that
they need to handle existing customers with
greater care. In 2019, we predict, this realization
will yield creative new and enhanced marketer
efforts to engage with existing customers.
Companies Seek Data That Meets Customers’
Approval
Say goodbye to third-party data and hello to
zero-party data — data that customers own and
willingly provide to brands. Reliance on customer
opted-in data will push companies to seek new
ways to augment their existing first-party data
and explore new metrics like customer emotion.
Brands Deliver Better Marketing Experiences
For Existing Customers
Brands know that their most valuable asset
is their relationship with existing customers.
Reenergizing social communities and better
serving customers via new marketing clouds
sitting within customer experience ecosystems
will be the new recipe for success.

But Marketers Will Still Try To Generate Buzzy

Headlines — And Fail
In today’s polarized consumer environment,
marketers will tempt fate through crisis-baiting
in the name of brand building. This tactic will
backfire as few brands have the diversification or
history to navigate this type of brand crisis.

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FOR B2C MARKETING PROFESSIONALS

Predictions 2019: B2C Marketing

Consumer Power Pushes Marketers To Better Data And Experiences, But Not Without A Few
Fumbles

by Jessica Liu, Emily Collins, Fatemeh Khatibloo, Stephanie Liu, Tina Moffett, Jim Nail, Joe Stanhope,
and Rusty Warner
with Brigitte Majewski, Caitlin Wall, and Christine Turley
November 8, 2018

Marketers Finally Face Reality: Consumer Power Is Here To Stay

Today’s consumers have more influence than ever. Take their demand for increased privacy and
transparency, which drove big headlines in 2018 in areas such as General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR) enforcement, Facebook-Cambridge Analytica outrage, and cynicism about influencers.1
We’re not surprised: At the halfway point of the 20-year-long age of the customer, we’re bound to
see dramatic manifestations of increased consumer power.2 Armed with social media megaphones in
their pockets, consumers easily mass-share bad brand experiences (e.g., United Airlines’ many PR
disasters) and blithely hyper-experiment with innovators like Peloton and Everlane.3 Marketers are left
scrambling to fix brand damage and prevent churn. But marketers won’t stay down for long. In 2019,
Forrester predicts, marketers will address consumer demands head-on, creating opportunities across
the ecosystem:

1. Consumers want control over their info, so marketers will turn to zero-party data. While
regulations like Europe’s GDPR and Vermont’s data broker registration law whittle away access
to third-party data, marketers will need new ways to augment their existing first-party data. All
hail zero-party data — data that customers own and willingly give to brands. In 2019, we’ll see
a renewed push for social sign-on providers that will tout their ability to reduce friction in the
registration/checkout process and safely share user-provided data to the brand. Meanwhile,
marketing technology (martech) vendors will launch preference management platforms to enable
zero-party data capture at scale across channels, and agencies will race to create interactive
digital experiences to capture self-reported preference and intention data.4 By the end of the year,
15% of global consumer brands will have evolved their preference collection practice from basic
subscription management to true content and context preferences.

2. Consumers want better experiences, so marketers will add emotion metrics. Marketers are
consumed with measuring conversions or revenue but ignore emotional responses that reveal
experience satisfaction and stoke recall.5 In 2019, interest in blending hard data with psychological

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FOR B2C MARKETING PROFESSIONALS November 8, 2018
Predictions 2019: B2C Marketing
Consumer Power Pushes Marketers To Better Data And Experiences, But Not Without
A Few Fumbles

principles — like intense satisfaction or displeasure — will accelerate as measurement vendors

probe the predictive power of a brand’s emotional intensity against base revenue (revenue not
impacted by marketing efforts). Look for Nielsen to move beyond just integrating Visual IQ, its
2017 attribution acquisition, to partnering with sister company Nielsen Neuroscience to add
emotional variables to its marketing performance models. Other marketing measurement leaders
like Marketing Evolution and Analytic Partners will test Motista’s Emotional Connection Score or
RealEyes’ EmotionAll score for their explanatory power in predicting advertising ROI.

3. Consumers want better quality social media, so marketers will rediscover community. In
response to social media’s latest quality and privacy problems, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
are emphasizing connections to family and friends over media and brands.6 Social advertising
won’t disappear, but marketers will invest more energy into existing social followers and brand.
com community members to reinvigorate relationships with loyalists. Sixty-five percent of loyalty
decision makers already use social media to interact with loyal customers in some way.7 We
predict that number to top 95% as more brands mimic Allbirds successfully selling a limited-edition
birthday line sneaker only to its Instagram followers, TripAdvisor adding social network functionality
to build connections among its travel-loving community, or the World Surf League having a chief
community officer position.8

4. Consumers want consistency and relevance, so martech will meld with CX. Once, marketing
clouds were going to upend the marketing industry. But the landscape has changed: Customers
demand that marketing coordinate with sales, service, and commerce to deliver better experiences,
and only a handful of serious enterprise marketing software suites (EMSS) vendors remain. The
result? There’s no longer a play for a standalone marketing cloud — and that’s a good thing.
Marketing clouds will pivot to help marketers stake their claim in the customer experience (CX)
ecosystem, shifting away from monolithic solutions just for marketers to instead function in the
larger context of CX solutions. EMSS vendors will start to support cross-role collaboration, act as
the clearinghouse for customer data across engagement touchpoints, and integrate with the CX
ecosystems to deliver consistency and personalization. Case in point: the recent Adobe, Microsoft,
and SAP open data initiative.9

5. Consumers want purchases to reflect values, so marketers will court controversy.

Consumers want to align their hearts and wallets, leading marketers to try to imbue brands with
their customers’ values.10 But in this polarized climate, brand crisis is inevitable.11 One way to
deal with the challenge is to embrace it as Nike did with its 30th anniversary campaign featuring
beleaguered football player Colin Kaepernick.12 In 2019, copycat brands will pursue their own side-
choosing campaigns, expecting to replicate Nike’s apparent successes of free impressions and
brand differentiation.13 Unfortunately, they’ll quickly learn that few brands have the product and
global diversification of Nike’s portfolio or the brand history of, say, a Patagonia to minimize crisis
impact.14 Plus, with each crisis baiting, consumers will get less tolerant of inauthenticity, raising the
bar for all brands in terms of values-based marketing.15

© 2018 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. 2
Citations@forrester.com or +1 866-367-7378
FOR B2C MARKETING PROFESSIONALS November 8, 2018
Predictions 2019: B2C Marketing
Consumer Power Pushes Marketers To Better Data And Experiences, But Not Without
A Few Fumbles

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Endnotes
See the Forrester report “Marketing Under GDPR Hinges On Data Governance.”
1

Source: Jessica Liu, “See The Forest For The Trees In Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica Problem,” Forrester Blogs,
March 29, 2018 (https://go.forrester.com/blogs/see-the-forest-for-the-trees-in-facebooks-cambridge-analytica-
problem/).

Source: Brigitte Majewski, Erna Alfred Liousas, and Jessica Liu, “Facebook Fumbles Its Own Brand Crisis,” Forrester
Blogs, April 19, 2018 (https://go.forrester.com/blogs/facebook-fumbles-its-own-brand-crisis/).

See the Forrester report “How To Work With Digital Influencers.”

See the Forrester report “Winning In The Age Of The Customer.”

2

See the Forrester report “The State Of Empowered Customers And Technology: Benchmark 2017, US.”
3

An increasing number of direct to consumer (DTC) brands are emerging to disrupt traditional brands that sell via
channels such as retailers. Source: Hugh Williams, “The Rise of Direct-to-Consumer Brands,” RetailTechNews, July
10, 2018 (https://www.retailtechnews.com/2018/07/10/the-rise-of-direct-to-consumer-brands/).

See the Forrester report “Consumer Data: Beyond First And Third Party.”
4

© 2018 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. 3
Citations@forrester.com or +1 866-367-7378
FOR B2C MARKETING PROFESSIONALS November 8, 2018
Predictions 2019: B2C Marketing
Consumer Power Pushes Marketers To Better Data And Experiences, But Not Without
A Few Fumbles

See the Forrester report “Emotions Fuel Your Brand Energy.”

5

Source: Jessica Liu, “The Facebook And Twitter Q2 Earnings Story: Quality Over Quantity,” Forrester Blogs, July 27,
6

2018 (https://go.forrester.com/blogs/the-facebook-and-twitter-q2-earnings-story-quality-over-quantity/).

Source: Forrester’s Q2 2018 Global State Of Customer Loyalty Online Survey.

7

Source: Ann-Marie Alcántara, “Allbirds Celebrates Its Birthday With a Limited-Edition Shoe Collection Available Only
8

on Instagram,” Adweek, March 2, 2018 (https://www.adweek.com/digital/allbirds-celebrates-its-birthday-with-a-

limited-edition-shoe-collection-available-only-on-instagram/).

Source: Marty Swant, “TripAdvisor Is Turning Itself Into a Social Platform for Travel Lovers,” Adweek, September 18,
2018 (https://www.adweek.com/digital/tripadvisor-is-turning-itself-into-a-social-platform-for-travel-lovers/).

Source: “Tim Greenberg,” LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-greenberg-2523a518/).

Source: “Adobe, Microsoft and SAP Announce the Open Data Initiative to Empower a New Generation of Customer
9

Experiences,” Adobe press release, September 24, 2018 (https://news.adobe.com/press-release/experience-cloud/

adobe-microsoft-and-sap-announce-open-data-initiative-empower-new).
10
See the Forrester report “Align With Consumers’ Values To Win Their Hearts And Wallets.”
11
See the Forrester report “Brands Forget The Rules Of Modern Marketing When Crisis Hits.”
12
Source: Darren Rovell, “Colin Kaepernick featured in Nike ad running Thursday,” ESPN, September 6, 2018 (http://
www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/24586190/nike-run-colin-kaepernick-ad-nfl-opener-thursday).
13
In the weeks following the campaign launch, Nike sales were up 31%. And according to Apex Media Group, Nike
earned $43M in media exposure in the first 24 hours. Source: Eben Novy-Williams, “Kaepernick Campaign Created
$43 Million in Buzz for Nike,” Yahoo Finance, September 5, 2018 (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kaepernick-
campaign-created-43-million-163435852.html).

Source: Gina Martinez, “Despite Outrage, Nike Sales Increased 31% After Kaepernick Ad,” Time Inc., September 10,
2018 (http://time.com/5390884/nike-sales-go-up-kaepernick-ad/).
14
Over one-third of its reported $32B 2017 Nike Brand revenue comes from regions outside of North American and
Western Europe. Source: “2017 Form 10-K,” Nike (https://s1.q4cdn.com/806093406/files/doc_financials/2017/ar/
docs/nike-2017-form-10K.pdf).
15
It’s still too early to tell the long-term impact on consumers. Even with sales up, consumer reaction to Nike’s campaign
is split. Source: Sarah Vizard, “Consumers split over impact of Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign,” Marketing Week,
September 12, 2018 (https://www.marketingweek.com/2018/09/12/consumers-split-over-impact-of-nikes-colin-
kaepernick-campaign/).

© 2018 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. 4
Citations@forrester.com or +1 866-367-7378
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