Five Marketing Trends for 2025

While we’re pondering the big questions ahead of New Year’s Eve – such as whether this is the year to give dry January a go or how far into 2025 any of our new year resolutions will last – let’s also give some thought to what the next twelve months might have in store for marketers.

What marketing trends will shape 2025?  Although we don’t have a crystal ball, and the pace of change in the marketing industry seems to get more rapid with every year, here are five trends we think the marketing world will be talking about over the coming year.

1. AI (AGAIN!)

If you have a sense of déjà vu, that might be because AI featured on our list of social media marketing trends for 2024. However, it’s a technology that’s both evolving rapidly and taking its time to fully enter day-to-day working life.  While some enthusiastic adopters are actively using AI in all manner of ways, many are still only testing the water.

We’re putting it on our list for 2025 because there’s no doubt that AI has transformative potential but there’s a way to go before we see how and where this transformative impact will be felt.

There remains justified scepticism – and concern – about how AI is being used, how trustworthy and accurate it is, and the potential risk to brand reputation for those companies expecting lower quality tech to replace human input across fields as diverse as customer service chatbots and content creation. And that’s before we explore the knowledge gap and training needed to enable teams to effectively integrate AI into their work processes.

How marketers use AI in 2025 will in part be driven by what the big tech firms invest in and the functionality that becomes available. Meta is investing heavily, as is TikTok, so expect to see more AI-powered features rolled out across these platforms, particularly around advertising. But from advanced data analysis to audience segmentation, the broader vision for AI in marketing is surely its potential to empower people by providing easier, quicker access to better quality insights, freeing up time to focus on the strategic and creative aspects of marketing where the human-touch add real value.

2. AR/VR EXPERIENCES

This has the potential to be another marketing trend that gets added to these prediction lists every new year and then fails to fully materialise.  At a certain point, you might start to question whether the consumer appetite is there, but this feels like an area where enthusiasm will follow when the tech delivers what people envisage. And we’re nearly there. The product sales potential for AR wearables – from ‘try on’ experiences to visualising items in situ – is huge. 

So, when the availability of genuinely wearable AR tech becomes widespread, and it shakes off the misconception that it’s really only for gamers, it will offer exciting real-world potential for marketers.

With Meta also making massive investment in both AR and VR development, this remains a space to watch, and its highly likely we’ll increasingly see functionality which integrates with AR/VR appearing on Insta and FB this year. The brands that are ready to jump on these opportunities first will have an interesting point of differentiation from the competition.

3. SOCIAL SHOPPING

The last year has seen a significant blurring of the lines between ecommerce and social media. It’s now easier than ever for people to shop directly from their social feeds.

For brands wanting to exploit social shopping’s potential, focusing on engaging, sharable content is a simple starting point. Meta platforms offer shoppable posts and TikTok Shopping is still growing rapidly, creating new ways to give customers simple routes to purchase.

In many sectors – particularly areas such as fashion and beauty – influencers and content creators are allowing brands to reach new audiences, build credibility, and drive sales. An influencer marketing strategy that  builds long-term relationships with high quality influencers can help smaller, challenger brands to cut through the noise and speak directly to potential customers, while also offering big brands the chance to establish stronger, deeper community connections.

4. LIVING YOUR VALUES

No more paying lip service to fundamental issues such as care for the environment, diversity and inclusion. These topics are now mainstream and expected from the majority of both your customer base and workforce. There has been a generational shift – which started with millennials, took hold among gen Z, and will be fully engrained in generation alpha[JA1]  – and brands need to understand that it’s a non-negotiable. 

Whether you’re a consumer-facing brand or you operate in the B2B space, if you’re going to talk about any of these topics, it needs to be really thought through and to come from the top. Your ESG approach cannot simply be a marketing device, it has to be an expression of how your business truly operates. This isn’t easy – we learnt a huge amount during our journey to become a certified B Corp™ – and not every business will want to put in the leg work. But if you aren’t going to do it properly, then don’t talk about it in an inauthentic way.

5. BEING BRAVE

2025 might be the year you have to be brave and let go of some of your brand rules. For marketers schooled in the strength of consistent brand positioning, loosening the reins doesn’t necessarily come easily. However, as user generated content outstrips publisher created content, and gen alpha users embrace ever more disruptive, “unhinged” styles, the right choice for some brands will be to experiment and take risks.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean taking a scatter gun approach and jumping on every trend; a good social media team will be making multiple assessments, and analysing lots of data, to make decisions about what will achieve your goals. But they will, in some instances, need scope to work outside traditional brand guidelines. It’s also worth noting that you can only execute this style of content well if you have clarity about your brand positioning, personality, and tone of voice. Without that foundation, there’s a danger your content will just look chaotic.

It’s a challenging and exciting time to be working in marketing. There’s potential to connect with your audiences in powerful ways, but the pace of change can be dizzying, and it’s harder than ever to stand out in a sea of content competing for people’s attention. Get in touch if you’d like to chat about how to devise PR or social campaigns that deliver in 2025.

The author: Jane Ainsworth is managing director of WPR. She has over 20 years’ experience in developing and delivering communications strategies for consumer brands including Dunelm, Tesco, Mothercare, Greene King, John Lewis, Bullring, Beaverbrooks and Westfield.