By Daniel Murray

How do you solve a problem like scaling cloud storage? Shane Hegdes believes the answer is changing your perception of what a company looks like.

Shane is Co-founder and CEO of Air, a creative operating system for marketers, that automates the mindless tasks marketers do every day.

Daniel and Shane jump right into how he got into the marketing space, what exactly a media company is, and why you shouldn’t always jump on the latest trends.

You’ll also hear Shane’s take on why all businesses are media companies whether they like or not.

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4 Reasons You Shouldn’t Jump on the Latest Marketing Trends

Marketing departments across the world are seeing a slew of new marketing trends. From chatbots to virtual reality, integrated marketing to honest digital, there’s a new fad for almost every letter of the alphabet. But as tempting as it may be to jump on board with all these new ideas, marketers should think very carefully before they commit to any of them. 

After all, while most marketing trends won’t have a negative impact on your business or have any long-term effects, not all of them are worth adopting either. 

In this article, we look at five reasons why you shouldn’t jump on the latest marketing trends.

It’s Just a Trend

Even the word trend lends itself to closer inspection. It’s crucial to consider the reasons why you shouldn’t adopt it.

Fads tend to disappear as quickly as they arrive. If you’ve decided to jump on board with a trend that has no longevity, you’re going to end up wasting time and money.

. In fact, many marketing trends are simply nothing more than a rebranding of an old idea in a different color with a new name. Integrated marketing, for example, is just a new name for 360 or multi-channel campaigns, that tempt marketers into believing they’re into something radically different.

Brand Safety is Still a Major Issue

Brand loyalty, brand affinity and brand building all take careful planning and execution. Keeping your brand reputation is becoming more and more of a priority for marketers who spend time and company crafting just the right audience message.

Jumping on a trend can be a great look. It can look dynamic and in touch with your demographic. Done wrong it can spell disaster, look cringey, misplaced and desperate. What’s taken months to establish can be damaged with one poor choice to jump on TikTok.

Consumers Want Transparency

If you’ve ever wondered why so many marketers have begun to focus on integrated marketing trend, rather than advertising, now might be the time to start wondering what’s behind the shift. 

That’s because, while marketing trend books are filled with all types of exciting new ideas, the majority of these are simply variants on the same old advertising theme. Publishers and ad tech companies want to change the terminology to make it sound less like ads and more like content. And that’s because consumers have become increasingly frustrated by online advertising.

With so many ads to block, avoid, and ignore, it seems almost counterintuitive to give them more ads. That doesn’t mean that marketers should abandon advertising altogether. Instead, they should focus on finding ways to integrate their products into the content people are consuming without resorting to ad trends.

New Technologies Need Time to Mature

One of the biggest reasons why many marketing trends are worth avoiding is because of their potential to do harm to the long-term goals of your business.

 If you’ve ever heard of “innovation-by-mistake” or “accidental innovation,” you know that the best technologies are often created when someone makes a mistake and then figures out how to fix it. Jumping on a new tech trend can be exciting and it can pay off, but paying out for the damage caused if they don’t is a huge reason to exercise caution.

Bottom Line

Ultimately, there are two main reasons why marketers should avoid jumping on the latest marketing trends: they could do more harm than good and they’re not actually marketing trends. Many of the so-called marketing trends are simply innovative technologies that can be used for marketing purposes. As such, marketing trends are nothing more than a rebranding of the technology that marketers should be using anyway.