From Spotify introducing AI to personalize music suggestions to companies focusing on personalized gifts, apparel, customized shoes and others, personalization is the need of the hour to ensure growth.
Why are companies obsessed with personalization? Why Americans love personalised apparel? While some are focusing on personalized services or products, some are providing their customers with personalized marketing, experiences, and others. Well, numbers and statistics say that personalization has been the growth driver for businesses and it is also the customer demand.
For instance, according to a recent survey from BCG, it was found that companies with effective personalization strategy not only gains efficiency in marketing, sales, and customer relationships, but they also get a boost in overall growth by 6 to 10%! (Source)
Also, with GenZ entering the market and creating its own purchasing power, the demand for personalized products has increased exponentially. For instance, in a survey from Salesforce, it was found that 74% of Gen Z customers are interested in personalized products. Apart from that, 67% of millennial customers, 61% of Gen X customers and 57% of Baby Boomers are also seeking personalized products. (Source)
So people are willing to pay a premium and get personalized products. In the cut-throat competitive digital market, creating personalized products can give your brand a boost and an edge over the competition. But, with more and more businesses creating personalized products and experiences for their customers, the customer buying pattern and demands keep changing.
How can a business keep track of the trends that are going to impact the personalized products market? Well, to align your personalized products with the market expectations or to create a trend in the personalized product market, you need to do the good old research and stay ahead of the market.
To understand where the market is going, you need to stay updated with all the latest happenings in the market and create a data-driven decision-making approach that can help you make informed decisions.
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If you are a printing business planning to create a trend of making the most from it in 2023, below are the ways you can track trends and find new ideas for personalized products:
Ways to track trends and find new personalized product ideas in 2023
- Industry-specific research papers and reports:
Just the way the blog contained some hardcore statistics that clearly define the personalized trends in this blog, there will be certain platforms that conduct research and generate trend reports in your industry. You must get access to these reports and make necessary changes in your offerings based on the findings.
Instead of relying on intuitions, you can rely on hardcore data and statistics that are published on credible platforms. To ensure that the data is relevant to your business, make sure that the platform has good domain authority and that the participants of the research are from your industry.
- Follow industry influencers:
Influencers have become an integral part of the industry and product trends. For instance, there are apparel platforms that are creating influencer galleries where customers can buy what the influencers are wearing. Certain trendsetters in the industry create their style statements and that becomes a trend in the market.
To ensure that you can make the most from these trends, follow these influencers and create product offerings that align with their feed or interests. You can also create a niche category for customers to check out what custom products the influencers have been using and sell them to your customers.
- Keep track of social media trends:
Whether it is the brands or the influencers, social media is the platform where big announcements, customer behaviour trends and the latest happenings in your industry can be tracked. If you are a B2B business, follow the trends on LinkedIn and Pinterest.
If you belong to the B2C market, you can follow certain industry-specific pages and accounts on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. You can also find industry influencers on these platforms.
- Product analytics and insights of your platform:
While the reports and social media can point you towards industry-specific trends and demands, personalization is now becoming micro and brands are now focusing on creating a personalized product for each customer!
Whether it is personalized digital experiences or personalized product suggestions for your customers, you can do it all with analytics, AI and deep learning to get actionable insights into your customers.
- Create engaging customer digital data points:
Customers can tell you what they want and it is all about listening to them or observing their behavioural patterns. While initially, brands did that with heat map study and A/B testing to understand customer behaviour, now brands are taking a marketing automation approach along with marketing omnichannel to create varied customer interactions on various platforms.
Create feedback forms, polls on social media, ask for their preferences, create their own experience profile and other such tactics to engage your customers and get suggestions or expectations directly from your customers.
- Competitive research:
Keeping a tap of your competition can give you insights about what the others are planning for the upcoming year. You can check the change in their website UI, their social media initiatives and also their other marketing channels to keep a tab on what your competition is planning for their customers.
Create a list of competitors that have gotten traction from the market and try to understand their Unique Selling Points (USPs). Apart from that, you can also analyse their weaknesses and create offerings that can provide you an edge over your competition.
Bonus: trending design ideas for 2023 (general print merchandise):
Since you have stayed this far, here is the list of all the print design merchandise ideas that will be trending in 2023 according to our research:
Please note that these are general industry trends that can apply to all B2C print merchandise businesses.
- NFT art collection- apparel, products and other print products focusing on the NFT art collection
- Personalized incident collection- create products that can have unique ways to display integral relationship details like date, ways to say I Love You, photo dump trends and others
- Anime collection- with the increasing GenZ audience, the demand for anime collections of merchandise has increased exponentially and can be a great market to capture.
- Social media Trends: There is always one thing or the other trending on social media. From Elon Musk merchandise to Black Lives Matter products, the internet will buy it all as and when it is trending.
- Pixel art- with the increasing NFT interest in general, pixel art has been resurfacing the custom merchandise market and its demand might increase in 2023.
Be prepared to stay ahead:One thing that is constant about trends is that it keeps changing with changing times, expectations and demand. In the fast-paced digital world, trends keep evolving with each passing day and it is essential to stay ahead of the market. Employ digital printing and web-to-print solutions to create cost-effective trend merchandise and to stay ahead of the competition with quick executions.
