Name: – deekay
Email: – dk@maxamator.com

Gawd… is Seth still being hawked as a God for repeating the Cluetrain Manifesto. Is there nothing new under the sun? I mean he’s a great thinker when he’s on a roll, but these 14 aren’t his shining moments.

15. There’ll be a massive shift in demand from companies that can give us MORE to companies that can give us LESS. As information floods us, we’ll seek reliable curators who can pick the diamonds from the zircons.

16. Demand will continue to shift away from products that come in a dictated form towards products that can be hacked.

17. The big brands are going to die. IPhones that 50% of the passengers on the train have? Whoopy Doo!

18. We’re going to see a mass cleanout of Web 2.0 sites. Just how many video sharing sites or twitter clones do we actually need?

19. Marketers will realise again that good advertising actually does work and we’ll see less and less of these “Seth says…” posts 😉

20. Mass exodus from Facebook and MySpace. Time is too valuable to deal with the glut of time-distracting apps and feeds here. We’ll seek out social networking sites with better signal to noise ratios (if we haven’t already).

21. We’ll discover that the wealthy are really nothing like us. As economies continue to see-saw, the rich will get richer, the poor will get poorer and the middle-class will be forever scrambling to keep up. Products and services for the extremely rich, like $8mil condos and superfast luxury yachts will just keep getting more and more extravagant, the rest of us will be wondering if we can afford the petrol taxes on our holiday airfare.

22. There’ll be a throwback to traditional media. Sure, downloading a movie might be free, but isn’t it so much nicer to catch it at the movies with dolby and popcorn. The more we all feel chained to our computers, watching mpegs and listening to sub-par MP3s, the more we’ll realise that we’ve compromised quality for convenience.

23. We’ll demand return on our dollar. Starbucks will radically revamp because we’ll realise that $6 for a bad coffee sucks and we’ll stop going. And they won’t be the only business to feel that shift.

I can’t agree buying packages is dying as well, especially in a modern world where we are exploring options to simplify things. Be it online or offline, solution providers are taking up the cue to provide more in a given space.

I’m more aligned to the school of thoughts that consumers are wanting more flexibility within the packages rather than more sources. It’s really a pick-n-match kind of thing.

The true New Marketing, I feel, is what consumers seriously want and not what we perceive them to want. That monopolizing trait is also limiting the choices of Singapore consumers. Companies must first be open-hearted to competitions before we can generate real value for consumers. I always enjoy understanding why a certain consumer leave a certain company.