IRL experiences, customer feedback, and more: CMOs on 2024’s overlooked marketing trends

Not every marketing trend gets its 15 minutes of fame.

While AI’s effects on marketing got plenty of hype in 2024, there are plenty of other tools and strategies that perhaps didn’t get the same amount of attention.

That ends now. We asked several CMOs what they think are the most overlooked trends in marketing today to know what other marketers might be missing. Here are some of their answers below.

Experiential marketing

Manu Orssaud, CMO, Duolingo: Audiences will continue to seek more authentic connections with brands. As a result, successful brands will be the ones that start to invest in experiential marketing and live events. We’ve tried this approach at Duolingo this year with our first-ever Duolingo pop-up and have seen some great results.

Catherine Ferdon, CMO, Cash App: There is still immense value in creating IRL moments to enhance brand authenticity. I think we underestimate how much people want to connect and engage not just with their favorite brands, but with people who have similar interests. Fostering that in-person connection can often drive far more impact than any CTV or digital ad spot could, so thinking about brand or campaign extensions through that lens will almost certainly fortify existing audience relationships and forge new ones.

Community and customer feedback

Stephanie Perdue, VP of marketing, Chipotle: Actively listening to guests and co-creating with true fans and like-minded brands…We are always listening to feedback from our guests and receive inputs from social listening, customer care, and qualitative and quantitative consumer research.

Andy Judd, CMO, Poppi: CX and community management as an extension of social media is too often overlooked. Don’t get me wrong; we love to make and share organic content, but the real magic is in all the little interactions, as this is such a powerful tool to unlock advocacy. But to do it right, you have to be authentically in lockstep with your target consumer—how you speak, when to speak, a comment back, a surprise case of product. It is a lost art and requires a willingness to dedicate real resources, but the ROI is undeniable.

Suzanne Kounkel, global and US CMO, Deloitte: I believe that harnessing your real customers’ participation is an overlooked marketing trend. Today’s best brands lean into customization, pulling on the highest intersection between continuity and personalization, allowing customers to participate in interesting, unexpected ways. All brands have rules—rules are easy—but leaning into creativity and customization allows for a sense of connection that builds trust and loyalty.

Storytelling

Selby Drummond, CMO, Bumble: It can be incredibly hard to invest in original content and longer-form narratives—it is hard to measure the ROI and costly to produce—but it can also be the thing that sets your brand apart in a sea of clickbait and algorithm optimization. It is so important to build depth in the conversations you have with and in front of your audiences, and allow them to see the humanity behind a brand, what makes your brand unique, and the reasons why you do what you do.

Live shopping and interactive ads

Libby Strachan, director of marketing, Free People: For us, live shopping has still been growing. I know that that was really overhyped for a while, and while it’s by no means a major revenue driver for us, it’s still been really great to test and figure out what type of video content our customers are most interested in.

Cathy Oh, marketing officer, TV and mobile service business and Samsung ads at Samsung Electronics: Interactivity is revolutionizing how audiences engage with content. From scanning QR codes to participating in gamified experiences, viewers are no longer passive—they’re actively connecting with what they watch, often through their phones. The combination of FAST’s broad accessibility and interactive, cross-screen experiences creates a massive opportunity for brands to engage audiences in fresh, meaningful ways—an opportunity still largely untapped.

Multicultural marketing

Sylvia Shubert, US therapeutic area head for obesity in commercial strategy and marketing, Novo Nordisk: I think what often gets overlooked in marketing is something just as simple as meeting patients where they are–particularly people of color. We’ve worked to prioritize multicultural marketing efforts that meet underrepresented and marginalized groups living with chronic diseases where they are, to make it easy for them to engage with the content. Whether that is through patient advocacy partners or local grassroots organizations, it’s about ensuring the content is relevant and relatable to these communities. When it comes to being a leader in deepening our understanding of people living with obesity and how they experience their condition every single day, that’s something you can never overlook.

Data analytics

Wanda Gierhart Fearing, chief content and marketing officer, Cinemark: There is so much information you can glean from customer insights with modern technology, and the key is knowing how to utilize it to greatly enhance performance and retention rates and make a meaningful impact for the company.