• by Todd Wasserman , March 14, 2022

Two years since the World Health Organization first labeled COVID a pandemic, marketers are wondering what sort of changes COVID has wrought.

COVID is far from over, but Rebecca Katz, director of the Centre for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University, recently speculated (in the Financial Times)  that if no new COVID variants arrive and vaccination levels improve, the emergency phase of COVID could be over by the end of 2022.

For marketers, there is ample reason to begin thinking about what a post-COVID era could look like, and what changes from the COVID era are likely to stick around.

Here are a few guesses:

If you’re not fully digital, you probably won’t be around very long. The digital transformation that started in the 1990s got a big push in 2020, when COVID hit. Boston Consulting Group recently stated that 30% of the companies in the S&P Global 1200 index are making the transition to digital incumbent status. That means that 70% of those companies are falling behind. In a recent survey by Twilio, 97% of executives said that COVID sped up their digital transformation, and 79% said COVID led them to increase digital budgets.

Stores will survive, though perhaps in a different form. Target fulfills 75% of its online orders from its stores, and Best Buy reported 42% of its online orders were picked up in store. Target estimates that it costs 40% less to ship items from its stores than from warehouses. In addition to being a place to pick up your online orders, a retail location needs to be a fun place to hang out.

Gaming is the key to young consumers. Some 87% of young people play video games on a daily or weekly basis.  “Video games were already growing significantly before COVID-19, but have been amplified during the pandemic,” according to Deloitte’s 2021 Digital Media Trends survey.

Social media is Gen Z’s news source. In a Deloitte survey, Generation Z ranked social media as the No. 1 way they prefer to get news. Only 12% selected news from network or cable TV.  Boomers were the opposite—just 8% got their news from social media.

These changes aren’t necessarily driven by COVID. They likely would have happened anyway, but COVID made them happen much quicker. Marketers should keep an eye on these trends as they move forward.