We’re a couple weeks into the new year and that means it’s trend time. As we kick off 2025, we say good riddance to the year behind us - no-one will argue that it was a doozy! All that happened in the previous 12 months, had a significant impact on consumer behaviour… both in how we consider what to buy and what we actually purchase.  

For businesses that are in the growth phase, they really have to understand these changes; it’s essential for maintaining momentum and standing out in competitive markets. 

In a world where trust is harder to come by than a parking spot at Costco on a Saturday, it’s no wonder trust levels are shifting globally. According to the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in institutions, businesses, and media is declining across North America and Europe. But, let’s get down to it…. what does that mean for your business? In this blog we’ll give you a cheat sheet to understanding how these trends impact your customers, their wallets, and your bottom line—plus what you can do to stay ahead of the game.

With 2024 close to wrapping up, 2025 is right around the corner. That means it’s time to plan for the marketing year ahead and, here at RCM, time to analyze how our Clients marketing performed. Whether you are unsure if you need to make changes to your marketing, your ROI is lacking or you just want to see how your brand is stacking up against your own objectives or the industry standards, we recommend everyone complete a marketing audit in order to kick off 2025 with their best foot forward.

So…your social engagement is sucking. You’re barely getting any likes, almost no shares, and comments, well, they’re not really happening either. But does it really matter?  Engagements allow us to gauge whether our content is interesting to our target audience. Higher engagements indicate a stronger relationship with the brand. Therefore, this is an extremely important social media metric to monitor especially if social media is a key piece of your overall marketing pie.

When it comes to communications, personalization, segmentation and targeting customers is just a natural way of doing business. So what is hyper-personalization? Is this just a new marketing word made up to describe something very similar? Well, maybe not. Hyper-personalization is a form of marketing that uses artificial intelligence (AI) in conjunction with real-time data. It creates communications such as emails, videos, and more that are customer-specific and highly granular. Hyper-personalization can also be referred to as one-to-one marketing. But aren’t we already doing that? 

In today’s fast-paced world, brands aren’t just selling stuff—they’re also expected to make a difference. This blog dives into the “human brand” concept and challenges whether they’re really a new and unique thing, or if it’s just some new marketing BS that we are trying to make out of nothing. Are brands really evolving into more empathetic, purpose-driven entities, or is this just a shiny new label for what companies have always done?