Marketing Trends & Insights - The Latest in Innovative Marketing | Aug 2021 - redpepper
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Marketing Trends &
Insights
The Latest in Innovative Marketing | Aug 2021
To d a y l e t ’ s d i s c u s s …
1. DTC Insights for CPG Brands
2. Resurgence of Direct Mail
3. GPT-3 in Marketing
4. Retail Holiday Trends
5. Sponsorship Opps: The New and the Tried & True
G R O W F O RT H
DTC Insights for CPG
There’s a big trend happening in the CPG world: big companies are seeing the opportunity to take control
of their narratives and own consumer journeys in ways that aren’t possible in retail alone—going DTC.
Why a big brand would want to go DTC (beyond the obvious increase in profit margins):
• A competitive advantage over startups. Manufacturing efficiencies, diverse in-house talent, and robust
databases of consumer insights give corporations the ingredients for successful innovation.
• Opportunity to own the shopping experience. Adding a DTC channel to complement their retail
strategy gives brands breathing room from competition & the ability to reinforce brand loyalty.
• More access to customers. Owning your own first-party data provides the ability to be nimble in
iteration and decision-making (plus you don’t have to share the retailer’s consumer insights with all
your competitors).
Notable examples of big brands going DTC:
• Ocean Spray launched its Lighthouse Innovation Incubator to create products that compete against
rivaling startups emerging in the health and wellness space.
• Unilever opened an online store for Ben & Jerry’s fans to order their favorite ice cream. The data from
this endeavor has led them to create cereal-inspired flavors that competitors have since copied.
• Beyond Meat debuted an online shop that they use as a “test kitchen” to gauge customer reactions.
G R O W F O RT H
Resurgence of
Direct Mail
Before the advent of the internet, direct mail was a pillar of a healthy marketing mix. As the digital landscape
constantly evolves, the value of previous tactics may be coming back up with a fresh perspective.
Why direct-mail marketing is taking off again:
• Brands don’t want to put all their eggs in Google and Facebook’s baskets with the constant changes
getting tossed around—they want to diversify their marketing mix.
• At 65 cents/full-sized catalog, direct-mail is cheaper than the average CPC for DTC brands, which is
between $2-4 (that’s a pretty big difference).
• Direct-mail can complement an e-commerce strategy by driving customers online for purchase.
• Having a physical presence establishes legitimacy—plus, you gotta touch it to recycle it.
Brands leaning into direct-mail marketing:
• Mansur Gavriel, a luxury handbag brand, is debuting a direct-mail campaign, citing that it’s “becoming
harder to tell the brand’s full story digitally without constant spending.”
• Digital native DTC brand Brooklinen has been known to use direct-mail marketing, as they consider
“comfort” their domain (and that means meeting the audience at home).
G R O W F O RT HGPT-3 in Marketing
Developed by OpenAI, GPT-3 is a language prediction model that produces human-like text using AI
and deep learning…and it’s growing fast. Growing popularity and demand for the model has contributed
to its recent report that the model is averaging 4.5 billion generated per day (whoa). But it’s not just the
wow-factor that’s turning heads—GPT-3 has big implications for the future of marketing. hi matt
How do you use GPT-3?
• Essentially, you prompt the model and it gives you responses that you ideally wouldn’t be able to
tell came from a robot (okay, maybe sometimes you can tell).
What could this mean for marketers?
• GPT-3 can act as another team member—generating ideas during sprints and brainstorming
sessions, as well as removing any hesitancy to propose an out-of-the-box solution (a computer’s
not worried about being judged by his teammates).
• The model also plays well with VQGAN + CLIP, which means marketers can use AI to generate
ideas and then use MORE AI to bring them to life visually. Rinse. Repeat. Mind blown.
G R O W F O RT HRetail Holiday
Trends
While online shopping grew over 30% in the 2020 season, stores have now reopened, and more people will
be with their families to hand-deliver gifts. All in all, holiday sales are expected to surpass $1 trillion.
Some holiday shopping predictions:
- eCommerce will still see a bigger rise than in-store retail as a result of adaptation and improved CX.
- Thanksgiving and Black Friday will continue last year’s trend to boom in the eCommerce space.
- Digital trendiness will mean an earlier start date for holiday messaging (est. October).
Implications for brands:
- Hybrid for the holidays—brands need to connect early through digital, engage their audience, and
have a brick-and-mortar experience that’s just as engaging and seamless.
- Opportunity for geotargeting customers near your store now that people will be shopping in person.
- An ongoing trend toward eComm could mean an opportunity to gamify the experience or gift guides.
- A huge resurgence in holiday shopping is going to come with some logistical setbacks—be
transparent with your audience about inventory, order deadlines, shipping expectations, etc.
- Approach data flexibly: people might be searching for products they don’t normally shop for.
G R O W F O RT HSponsorship
Opportunities
New digital sponsorship opportunities are arising—and in-person events are ramping back up, making it a
great time to consider sponsorship as a next-level or experimental tactic.
Digital Sponsorships:
- TikTok launched an ad tool that lets brands sponsor trending organic content. Brands can identify pre-
made content that aligns with their products or audience and choose to sponsor it.
- Twitch started offering sponsorships outside of competition streams to promote a longer-term
partnership rather than a one-off campaign for a product launch.
- YouTube expanded its sponsorship slate, connecting brands with popular content in more categories.
- Digital sponsorships provide a unique opportunity for brands that
- A. Want to leverage influencers—or don’t.
- B. Want to create content—or don’t.
Event Sponsorships:
- Executives are showing more interest in attending, sponsoring, and creating live events.
- Sporting events are back which bring with them a lot of sponsorship real estate and an interesting
hybrid opportunity (and eSports viewerships provides an opportunity for multiple touch points).
G R O W F O RT HBorn a creative agency. We help brands pioneer the future of their industries.
That’s why we consider it our job to stay up on emerging trends.
Built to innovate.
redpepper is a creative agency and Innovation Lab. We started evolving in this direction
years ago, when agencies everywhere were trying to understand how to keep up with the
changing digital world. This was our way of diversifying. We knew the ever-changing
Talk to a real human — marketing landscape was not something to try and tame, but to make friends with, and to
help others do the same by teaching them how to more creatively do business within it.
Samara Anderson, VP of Sales & Marketing:
Looking back on what definitely felt risky at the time, we have zero regrets. What we do
samara@redpepperland.com
have are more opportunities to help our clients by applying our creativity in meaningful
ways, which is all we really ever wanted to do in the first place.
G R O W F O RT HThe Brief
‣ How CPG Brands Are Using DTC to Stay Competitive
‣ What Happens When CPGs Go DTC?
‣ The DTC Edge: Innovate Your CPG Brand From Within
‣ 4 Trends Impacting Retail Marketing Strategies
‣ What is GPT-3 and why is it so powerful?
‣ GPT-3 Powers the Next Generation of Apps
‣ OpenAI's New Language Generator GPT-3 Is Shockingly Good—And Completely Mindless
‣ Survey: E-commerce set to soar for the holidays
‣ The 2021 Holiday Preparation Playbook
‣ 75% of consumers say they'll spend more money with retailers they can message with this holiday season
‣ Big-name retailers update 2021 holiday strategies amid evolving shopping habits
‣ 2021 Holiday Shopping Ecommerce Stats & Trends [July 2021]
‣ YouTube Expands Sponsorship Opportunities Through YouTube Select
‣ Ad executives start warming up to in-person events, survey finds
‣ TikTok Launches New 'Spark' Ads Which Enabled Brands to Tap into Trending Organic Content
‣ Chipotle, Ally jump in as Twitch expands sponsorship opportunities
G R O W F O RT HYou can also read
