Late last night, as Aussies nationwide enjoyed Australia Day fireworks or a post-barbecue slumber, Forrester published my “Australian Marketing Predictions For 2010“.

For this report, I interviewed Australian marketing leaders from many sectors — retail, hospitality, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, consumer electronics and music — about their plans for the year ahead. I cross-checked my findings with other conversations I’d held recently with finance, FMCG and other companies to build a comprehensive picture of how marketing in Australia will change in 2010.

The short version: expect significant initiatives in the areas of interactive marketing, customer experience and customer intelligence. For the detail, please see the report.

While the report is about changes that will certainly affect Australia’s marketing sector as a whole, these shifts will of course play out in quite different ways for individual brands, marketers, media operators and agencies. So, there’s a role for discussing possibilities in this blog post, in addition to the predictions I make in the report. For example:

 

  • Some of the large Australian organisations that collect rich customer data through their loyalty programs could launch their own database marketing agencies, building on the commercial partnerships they already form with brands that want to access their data.
  • As MNCs strive to make their marketing more adaptive, they could start to borrow from those Australian marketers who, with low budgets and low levels of corporate supervision, have long been forced to start small and learn as they go. 
  • Tired of losing revenue to pureplays and overseas rivals, more traditional Australian retailers could significantly step up their ecommerce efforts.  
  • At least one icon of Australian traditional media — broadcast or print — could either go bust or switch to an online-only model run by a fraction of its previous staff.
  • Australia’s laws against parallel imports could become a topic of debate once more, as traditional retailers find it harder than ever to compete with ebooks and other electronic media. 

Will these five possibilities come to pass? Well, that will depend on the decisions of countless individuals. But we can be absolutely certain of one thing: Australian marketers will launch significant initiatives in the areas of interactive marketing, customer experience and customer intelligence in 2010. To see how and why, please grab a copy of the report.