There is an article on eMarketer.com that must be meant to shock us, and it does. According to this report, grocery store executives expect to abandon print advertising at a devastating rate in the next five years and move their efforts to social/internet marketing.
I can’t think of an industry that has relied on print adverting and especially circulars over the last million years more than the grocery business, so this report is shocking.
From the article:
Three-quarters of grocery retail executives surveyed in the US in March said they would use print media this year for marketing purposes, but just 17% expected to be doing so five years from now. Social media, by contrast, was expected to go from just 12% usage in 2012 to 65% usage in the next five years.
The reason this is happening is simply because consumers are abandoning printed newspapers so advertisers have to follow consumer behavior.
Social media was not expected to be the only beneficiary of declining interest by consumers in print media. The grocery retail executives said they would be changing their promotional strategies to account for lower newspaper circulation by increasing investments online in general (22%) as well as in shared or merged mail (19%) and solo or direct mail (14%).
If this shift holds true than there isn’t much hope for printed newspapers to survive much longer. Studies like this should make you even more motivated to help your local retailers abandon the old way of doing things and embrace new media. If they don’t shift, they may not be around much longer either.