Consumer strategies for a post-COVID age 

Editor’s note: Colin Buckingham is CEO, and Sarah Buckle is senior client director, Rainmakers CSI.

The enforced changes across the globe in the past 18 months have led to changes in digital behavior. E-commerce grew by 32.4% in the U.S. in 2020 against a total retail sales growth of 6.9%⁽¹⁾. Digital services have allowed many businesses to keep going, even thrive, and have helped bridge the gap between businesses and customers during the pandemic. The business challenge now is to understand how to continue deploying new digital capabilities in a way that does not detract from what consumers still love about physical experiences.  

Here are five suggested principles for integrating what you’ve learned about digital into successful consumer strategies for a post-COVID age. 

1. Customers are no longer willing to cut businesses some slack.

When businesses were frantically trying to respond to the new climate – with employees off sick or working remotely for the first time – a customer services phone line offering a repeat hold-tune and the message that “we are trying our best in unprecedented circumstances” could be forgiven. But we’re almost two years in and some brands are still playing the same tune and customers are no longer willing to hum along. How long can unprecedented be just that?  

Consumers expect better and have interacted with brands that have adapted much more quickly. Technology solutions deployed at the start of the pandemic were often a quick fix. Brands need to continue to evolve. Businesses risks being undermined if they are still reeling from the initial blow of the pandemic and continue to be unable to service customers effectively.

2. Allow the consumer to be in control. 

An increasingly digital world allows people to take even more control of their relationships with brands. Consumers enjoy cherry-picking the digital features they find to be beneficial and rediscovering and connecting with the real-world experiences they’re not willing to give up. We’re learning a multi-faceted approach to just about every aspect of our lives. 

Shopping behavior has evolved. The practice of online shopping was given a pandemic boost, but the outcome, as we emerge from the cycle of lockdowns, is that consumers are still blending online and bricks-and-mortar shopping strategies across different categories. 

Even in pre-COVID times, shoppers were finding the product they wanted to buy in store and then ordering online, or vice versa. However, when many brick-and-mortar stores were forced to close, brands like John Lewis saw one of their greatest benefits neutralized. Its partners were no longer able to demonstrate knowledge and value by helping consumers decide which kettle or TV was right for them. 

Currys PC World on the other hand launched its ShopLive service in June 2020, a contact-free, digital experience that allows customers to video call with an expert while they shop online – an attempt to replicate the in-store experience. Currys initially trialed this service with 20 sales staff and its success was almost instantaneous. Over 600,000 consumers used the service in the first five months, and it played a key role in helping the brand secure strong sales during Black Friday and Christmas 2020. 

The increase in online browsing also means that businesses need to ensure they’re standing out both online and in-store. This isn’t a totally new phenomenon, but the importance of online presence has been accelerated and widened. Marketing strategies must blend online and offline experiences seamlessly and integrate data from both to get a complete picture of consumer behavior. The way the publishing industry now views book covers, and the impact different designs create online and in a conventional bookshop, is just one example.

3. Brands that force digitalization risk losing customer loyalty.

Going too far over to the digital side will place you exactly where you don’t want to be. For example, viewing the menu of a restaurant through a QR code and ordering your food via an app was tolerated during the pandemic, when rules were in place to inhibit people moving around or touching physical materials. When brands rely on some of these technologies they are forgetting the reason many people eat out in restaurants. Ordering via an app might work brilliantly for fast-food chains but not necessarily for fine- or family-dining, where the human element – and the opportunity for guests to mull over their decisions or customize their orders – is a crucial part of the experience and the brand relationships. It’s worth pointing out that this is not simply generational. Although younger people are usually more agile in using technology, they have a similar craving for the wider experience. 

It is vital to have measures in place to understand how you retain and rebuild emotional connections with your brand – which experiences and touch points drive that connection, and which could potentially destroy it. 

4. Too much technology can mean less data and fewer insights.

It can be tempting to offer a digital solution to save effort, time and money, but in doing so you may compromise the accuracy of your data collection. Continuing with the restaurant example – quite often, customers dining together will place all orders on one person’s app, thus creating inaccuracies in the data collected from that table.   

Pizza chain Domino’s has attempted to rectify this problem, with its “Group Order” online process, whereby everybody is sent an invite link to input their order from their own phones. Domino’s gets a complete picture of its customers and uses technology to enhance the experience, not undermine it.

5. Fundamental customer strategies still apply.

Ultimately, the principles for defining a customer strategy are exactly as they’ve always been – understand your customers and make your business fit and connect with their needs. 

The pandemic drove some businesses to make decisions based on available technology – forcing changes on consumers because they solved the company’s own problems. This may have helped us all through a crisis, but the experience of the last 18 months has underscored the need to listen to your consumers – and to design solutions that fit around them. 

In category after category, we are seeing consumers reassert core needs and behaviors. Do not allow the pandemic and its immediate effects to distract you from the perennial truth that doing the important things brilliantly remains the key to consumers’ hearts.

Where are your consumers headed next?

Above all, grasp the opportunity! Marketers have spent the last 20 years reciting the mantra that behavior change is the hardest thing to achieve. Old habits may still die hard, but they have been shaken and loosened by the pandemic. And the process isn’t over yet. Consumers are sifting through the new behaviors they have been forced to adopt, asking themselves which ones they enjoy, and which parts of the old world they can cheerfully leave behind forever.

What does this mean for your business? Where are your consumers headed next? What might you be able to achieve that previously you would have shied away from because it would have been too risky or taken too long? The winners in the next phase will be the businesses who find the answers to these questions and use them as the starting point for their new strategies.