We’ve no need to tell you the world has changed. It’s almost impossible to escape the phrase ‘new normal’ and while you might think that only applies to remembering to wear a mask in a shop or staying two metres from strangers at all times (isn’t that a good idea anyway?), actually there’s more to it than that.
Just this week Domino’s Pizza announced it’s creating 5000 new jobs because of the increase in demand for home delivery and over the past six months the major supermarkets have needed extra staff to meet demand for home ordering.
Here in the Brandality office, one of the team tells us that she’s bought more from Amazon in the past six months than in the previous 10 years. However, alongside the very practical needs being met by brands, there are also new consumer mind-sets that businesses and brands must satisfy if they’re to survive this ‘new normal’…the convenience of home-delivery alone won’t cut it.
After the initial trigger-happy Amazon ordering of those first few weeks of lockdown, what we saw was family and friends asking themselves ‘do I really need this’ when considering a purchase – particularly as jobs looked less secure and the economy took a turn for the worse.
And we’re willing to take a bet that it’s not only us asking ourselves, ‘what is this brand doing for me/society now…how is it helping?’ before committing to purchase something.
Certainly, this is something that global research house Euromonitor has identified in its recent webinar examining how the pandemic has influenced the main drivers of global megatrends and hence the trends themselves.
For instance, it has identified that consumers still expect brands and businesses to offer authentic, immersive experiences, even if those experiences are provided by technology and pointed to the Faroe Islands tourist organisation that came up with the idea of offering virtual tours for lockdown courtesy of a Faroe resident with the GoPro camera. Cool, eh?
Then of course, there’s the amplified obsession with health, mental/emotional wellbeing, and hygiene. Euromonitor tells us that these are now something of ‘status symbols’ with consumers prioritising them as lifestyle choices and buying into brands that can help facilitate.
At the same time we might have put recycling, re-use and repair on the back-burner while we focus on health and hygiene, but Euromonitor believes this is very much a temporary state, so brands shouldn’t lose sight of their past promises to sustainability in the COVID fall-out. Aligning brand purpose with societal values and following through with action, is as important as ever. Is it time you took a fresh look at your brand through the lens of the ‘new normal’? Brandality can help. Why not give us a call and make an appointment for an informal chat.