Post-Pandemic Marketing: Put People First and Do Good Things For The World

Key Points:

• People everywhere are reconnecting with what matters most to them, creating the perfect conditions for purpose-driven brands to thrive.
• The pandemic demolished brand loyalty, and in the current cost-of-living crisis, marketers need to prioritize customer needs, right-size our price-value equation, and align our purpose with our brand experience.
• Working with a people-first mindset will help us all center on the things that matter to building a long-term connection with our customers, colleagues, and communities.

Have you ever prepped for a presentation or panel, found inspiration in some super-great supporting statistics, written out all of your talking points, and then managed only to remember about a third of what you wanted to say in the moment? Yeah, that was me last week.

The topic was what marketers can look forward to in a post-pandemic context (emphasis on “look forward to”—this was at least partially about finding positivity through the end of the pandemic), and some of the research I read was really compelling. It seems like a waste not to share more of it, so here you go: a quick run-down of some trends that can inform post-pandemic marketing strategy. (Credit for the framing questions goes to Cynthia Johnson at Bell + Ivy , who did an amazing job moderating the panel at the most recent Millennium Alliance’s CMO, CX, and Retail Assembly).

What are some of the positive ways the pandemic has changed brand marketing?

You know, everything I said before about the importance of positivity notwithstanding, we can’t forget that the pandemic is a tragedy—the loss of lives, economic impact, people’s lost sense of security, of predictability. That’s had an effect on how people perceive their world. In fact, it’s had nearly the same effect on people as other more individual tragedies, causing them to rethink what matters most to them. (Stanford Medicine published a really thoughtful Q&A on this topic with Debra Kaysen, a Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences with their Public Mental Health & Population Sciences division). For a lot of people, that means preserving time to spend with their family or communities and thinking about the mark that they leave in the world.

This collective reconnection with an overarching purpose that we’re seeing among people creates the perfect conditions for purpose-driven brands to thrive. A company like Wiley , where I work, which is a publisher and knowledge services company specializing in science and education, is really fortunate to have a guiding purpose—supporting knowledge seekers worldwide as they look to improve lives for themselves and their communities—that’s very consistent with the needs of the moment.

But I think, as we head into a post-pandemic environment, we’re seeing the opportunity for any brand to find its higher purpose and use it to connect with customers. I know there’s been a lot of commentary on this topic recently (PR Week did a nice recap of the back-and-forth.) But I fall firmly in the camp of believing businesses have a responsibility to create a positive impact in the world. And to me, that’s the most exciting thing that has happened to brand marketing in a long time. It’s giving us all the freedom to assert the good that we’re doing.

Brand purpose isn’t enough, though. We’re in a global cost of living crisis . The lingering effects of the pandemic combined with the impact of the war in Ukraine has disrupted global supply chains and created an energy crisis. We think it’s bad where I live in the US: most of us can’t even imagine the issues with the cost of energy in Europe and in other parts of the world.

In this context, we need to prioritize customer needs and act in the best interest of the people who count on us. In part, that means that we may need to right-size the price-value equation, either demonstrating or enhancing the value of what we provide or adjusting the price to suit how our offer stacks up against the essentials that customers are already struggling to pay for in their lives. And we need to align our purpose with our brand experience. If our goal is to create a positive impact in the world, every step of our experience should reflect that.

From a marketing perspective, it’s the perfect time for a reinvention, grounding ourselves in our guiding purpose and deriving inspiration from the needs of our customers, the people that we’re here to serve.

How did the CMO and executive marketing role change during the pandemic?

First off, if we weren’t already, we all needed to get very good at crisis response. We also needed to develop a tone and content that was mindful of the moment we were living in while being authentic and sometimes recognizing the limits of our role in our customers' lives. I remember that two-week period in March 2020 when we all thought it was important to send out a message to all of our customers telling them how they and their families could count on our support. That was cool. I must have had, like 87 emails a day from companies just checking in because it was a pandemic. Like the hair salon that I got my wife a gift card to three years ago was exactly who I needed to hear from during a global health crisis.

The pandemic made a lot of us realize that we really only needed to be there for our customers when it was relevant . In fact, I think the overarching lesson of the past few years is that we would all be better off being people-first in our thinking.

Certainly, the pandemic taught us that from a leadership perspective. How many of you received a call from one of your team about the death of a close family member or friend? How many of you had to lead through grief yourself? Or lead through the death or serious illness of a member of your organization? If we didn’t come out of this experience putting people first—our team, our customers, our community—I don’t know what’s wrong with us.

Something I’ve loved to see during the pandemic is CMOs and other marketing executives embracing empathy and recognizing that the most important thing to do is to take care of the people that you’re there for. The results will follow.

How did the pandemic change the way people shop?

It’s too easy to say that it drove more digital behaviors. Of course that’s true. What was the stat? That the US saw a $800B in eCommerce sales in 2021, a 50+% growth over 2019. And that the global e-commerce market reached $13 trillion in 2021?

Growth rates have been staggering. But I think that was more of a necessity of the moment than a genuine acceleration of the trend. The International Monetary Fund studied this alongside Harvard Business School recently. Online sales correlated super closely to mobility trends – we were stuck at home, we bought online. But in the US, we’re already seeing eCommerce revenues fall back to be more in line with what was projected before the pandemic happened. Oberlo also blogged on this topic recently and their projected growth rate chart frames the next couple of years really clearly. There’s a big drop-off predicted in eCommerce growth this year compared to last.

So, digital. Of course. But what really struck me about the pandemic is that it absolutely murdered brand loyalty. We all became very accustomed to trying to find things that were previously almost immediately available: Amazon’s fabled delivery infrastructure couldn’t keep up in those first months. So suddenly we were exploring Instacart, and Task Rabbit, and Uber Delivery. We became DIYers and actually kind of loved it.

Researching alternative ways to get something – to solve the problems that we look to products and services to solve – became commonplace. And we see the effect on brand loyalty: A recent study suggested that half of consumers would leave a company after one bad brand experience. That’s a brand that they were previously loyal to. And if they have multiple bad experiences, that number jumps up to about 86% of people willing to abandon a company .

Consumer choice is stronger than ever. A large chunk of the global population seemed to remember that brands need them way more than they need brands, and they’re now much less likely to tolerate an inconvenient buying experience and they’re less likely to be a repeat purchaser.

How has the workplace transformation changed shopping behavior?

Remote work, flexible schedules—they’ve created an absolute blending of work and personal lives, with shopping behaviors matching. People are switching between personal and professional tasks all day and night long. Microsoft and Forrester studied this a couple of months ago and encouraged all of us not to get caught with our digital marketing strategies on autopilot with the rise of what they called the Workday Consumer taking place.

I also think remote work trends benefit brick-and-mortar shopping experiences much more than they do digital ones. Think about it. You’re not tied to a desk for 9 straight hours (on a good day). You can pop out and get a few things done in the middle of your day.

The Shop Local movement—both in-person and online—is strong and I think still growing, and frankly, I’m kind of here for it. Remember that one of the things we lost during the pandemic was access to our community. And anything that brings that back in big or small ways is a good thing. Shop Local already saw some great gains during the pandemic. Intuit did a study that suggested that 70% of consumers are now supporting local businesses . A majority say that their reason for doing that is to keep money local, support their community, and support local creators, and I don’t think this commitment to community is likely to go away anytime soon.

How should marketers be preparing for continued inflation and a possible recession?

In the midst of a cost of living crisis for a huge portion of the global population, everybody’s worried about money. Every person. Every business. Every nonprofit. If we’re working with a people-first mindset, here’s what we’re doing in that context: We’re putting our money into helping our customers solve for their unmet needs. We’re earning long-term trust by providing high-value solutions and being transparent about what’s driving the economic terms around that. We’re living true to our purpose and our values, and we’re making it tremendously easy to do business with us.

I don’t think there’s a silver bullet. I don’t think we can say “Just have an influencer strategy” or “Optimize your site for eCommerce conversions.” I think the period that we’re entering – the post-pandemic period – is a time to reset the fundamentals of what we’re doing and how we do it, and I think that means in a lot of ways going back to basics on who our customers are, what they need and how we can help them, and how we can make it easier for them to get those solutions.

Do you have any tips for marketers struggling to communicate price hikes due to inflation without losing customers?

Look, you’re probably going to lose customers over price increases. But maybe not because of attitudes toward the price increase itself. It might just be impossible for some people or families or businesses to manage the price increase. That they genuinely can’t afford it.

So, I’d suggest that you have alternatives in place – different payment options, minimized increases for a longer-term commitment, ways for people or organizations to earn discounts through referrals, etc. And, obviously, be transparent about what’s driving the price increase. But the tone here is really important. No one cares if your business is struggling. But they do care if they’re a customer of yours and the quality of your solution is impacted. Or if the economic realities impact the type of company you are. So, in your comms, lean into that: “we’re increasing prices because we have to so that we can maintain our quality and continue to provide you with a solution you can trust. We know that it’s not easy out there in the world right now, so, in case that’s challenging for you, here are some things we can do to help.” I think that would be a powerful message to receive as a buyer.

What advice would you give CMOs and marketing executives to future-proof their marketing strategies?

It’s time for a reset. We have an amazing opportunity to change how we’re perceived by our audiences: to be genuine partners committed to helping them solve for their needs.

But when we do that, we’re not the hero in our own story. Your brand isn’t the hero in its story. Your customers and future customers are the hero, and you’re their guide, helping them solve their problems and reach their potential. So, my advice is to examine every element of our strategies with the question “how will this investment help my customers and future customers?”