We’ve accepted marketing life alongside a pandemic, WHAT NOW?

Since COVID-19 rocked our global perspective earlier this year, it seems 2020 has given the marketing industry a good rinse.

In a Marketing Dive article aptly titled, 3 months in, how COVID-19 has permanently changed marketing, the concept of crisis is explored within a marketing context admitting that the changes we’ve made to deal with this different social and economic landscape are changes that will become the norm.

Bob Liodice, CEO of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), told Marketing Dive that, “what COVID did is force a lot of marketers to step back and rethink relationships with consumers.” What the pandemic taught us is the important skill of agility. Ewan McIntyre, VP analyst of Gartner's marketing practice is quoted saying, "I don't just think that's COVID. I think we've seen this over the last 10 days [of protests], about brands having to be super agile in the way that they think about how they position themselves and what they mean.”

Although there has been a rise in consumer-led accountability for brands over the past few years, it is clear that this has reached a fundamental boiling point.

This trickles into the economic side of the conversation. COVID-19’s hit on the economy has been significant and as it slowly begins its recovery consumers are focused on their buying power – both from a budgeting and activism perspective. “A precarious direction for the economy moving forward puts the onus on marketers now to plan for multiple different outcomes and how each — from a significant recovery to none at all — will ladder down into all aspects of their business,” the article continues.

The introduction of remote working has decidedly reformed the work week across many industries. As most companies move towards a hybrid working model, marketers are forced to be more creative in pursuits for the perfect strategy.

“Fundamentally, the purchasing landscape is looking very different.”

The article points out that, “already a bigger part of brand strategy prior to COVID-19, e-commerce has jumped to the top of the agenda for marketers looking to engage the troves of people who are stuck at home and might remain wary of physical shopping for the foreseeable future.”

We have indeed faced many challenges this year, but the marketers will have to embrace their agility and creativity in order to forge a way forward. For, as much as we’d like to believe in the concluding segment of the pandemic being our saving grace, as McIntyre says, "If it's not COVID and it's not the challenges we've had over the last 10 days, it's going to be the climate crisis."

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https://www.marketingdive.com/news/3-months-in-how-covid-changed-marketing/579594/