10 Truths About Marketing After the Pandemic

by Janet Balis
March 10, 2021

Noam Galai/Getty Images

Summary. The Covid-19 pandemic upended a marketer’s playbook, challenging the existing
rules about customer relationships and building brands. One year in, there’s no going back to the
old normal. Here are 10 new marketing truths that reveal the confluence of...more
It’s safe to say that 2020 was a year like no other and that 2021 will certainly not revert back to
the old normal. So, as marketers think about building brands during this year and beyond, what
should we take away from the pandemic? What can we do to help companies grow faster? And
how is marketing being redefined in the age of Covid-19?
Asking and answering these questions is critical to marketing success in the months and years
ahead. Over last several months I’ve been comparing what I’ve learned from two decades
working in media and marketing with what we’ve all learned during this single year of epic
change. In particular, I’ve identified 10 ways in which the pandemic challenged critical truths
about marketing and gave us a new set of rules moving forward.
1. Old truth: Marketing begins with knowing your customer.
New truth: Marketing begins with knowing your customer segment.
The Covid-19 crisis has reinforced what we already know: that brands must communicate in very
local and precise terms, targeting specific consumers based on their circumstances and what is
most relevant to them. That means truly understanding the situation on the ground, country by
country, state by state, zip code by zip code. For some businesses, such as banks, restaurants, or
retailers, it may even mean tailoring communications store by store.
Beyond geography, we have learned marketing messages need to be personally relevant, aligned
to an individual’s situation and values, as opposed to demographics, such as age and gender.
Creating a personal, human connection within any commercial message requires defining
consumer segments that describe people according to multiple dimensions that influence their
purchasing behavior — from their psychographics to attitudinal characteristics.
The EY Future Consumer Index, which has conducted five waves of research with 14,500
individuals in 20 countries since the start of the pandemic, has identified five different cohorts of
consumers:
1. Affordability first (32% of consumers): Living within their means and budget, focusing
less on brands and more on product functionality.
2. Health first (25%): Protecting their health and that of their family, choosing products
they trust to be safe and minimizing risks in the way that they shop.
3. Planet first (16%): Trying to minimize their impact on environment and buying brands
that reflect their beliefs.
4. Society first (15%): Working together for the greater good, buying from organizations
they find to be honest and transparent.
5. Experience first (12%): Living in the moment to make the most of life, often making
them open to new products, brands, and experiences.
Utilizing customer segmentation and personas can bring deeper insights to media strategies and
creative marketing approaches. Better still, these insights can be carried through to inform the
full customer journey.
2. Old truth: You are competing with your competitors.
New truth: You are competing with the last best experience your customer had.
Consumer expectations were already on the rise before Covid-19. Gen Z grew up with
technology seamlessly integrated into their lives. Direct-to-consumer companies (like Glossier or
Parachute) were already conditioning us to expect a level of hyper-personalization since they
were particularly adept with our personal data.
But when the coronavirus hit, digital transformation accelerated overnight. This, in turn, sent
consumer expectations skyrocketing in terms of what companies could do for them with a more
digital experience. The customer expects so much more than just a seamless digital transaction,
as Carla Hassan, chief marketing officer of Citi, explained to me earlier this summer. Now that
companies have their personal data, they want anticipatory, personalized experiences across the
entire customer journey.
Companies should follow three strategies to ensure their experiences deliver their customers’
rising expectations:
1. Make brand scores a key KPI for the full customer-facing organization, ideally using
real-time analytics as opposed to a snapshot looking backwards from a point in time.
2. Build the right data and technology foundation to support important use cases throughout
the customer journey.
 3. Align individual and collective goals across the customer journey so any disconnects
between functional silos like marketing, sales, and customer service are invisible to your
end consumer.
3. Old truth: Customers hope you have what they want.
New truth: Customers expect you to have exactly what they want.
If the bar just keeps rising, we must aspire to new values around customer experiences — in both
a B2C and B2B context. Consumers today expect that any experience will be frictionless,
anticipatory, relevant, and connected. In other words, they are concerned only with getting what
they want, when they want it. And they insist nothing gets in their way.
Creating these experiences requires companies to place data and technology at the core of their
organization. This likely means building some degree of machine learning and/or artificial
intelligence into the mix. Why? Because data enables us to create more relevant experiences
across one or more dimensions of the four Cs:
 Content (that can be provided in experiences like emails or mobile apps);
 Commerce (such as physical retail, e-commerce, or a hybrid experience);
 Community (such as convening B2B buyers at a virtual trade show or hosting a webinar
on home repair for consumers); and
 Convenience (like offering consumers coupons or benefits from a loyalty program).
Today, most of the 4Cs are delivered in “one-size-fits-all” approaches, but as consumers
increasingly demand greater personalization, companies will need to use more data and
intelligence to sharpen their decision-making and drive greater relevance in their customer
interactions to build stronger human connections to their brands.
4. Old truth: Courting customers is just like dating.
New truth: Courting customers is just like online dating.
For a long time, marketing was largely about buying mass reach or targeted reach at the best
rates in media and hoping to convert it. So, basically, it was like going to as many parties or bars
as you could in the hope you would find that special someone. It was a world of spontaneity,
serendipity, and frankly, a lot of face-to-face encounters.
Enter online dating and swiping through apps. Now, finding your perfect match may be less
about chance and more about data and algorithms. In marketing terms, we have seen a shift from
brand marketing to build reach to performance marketing to generate leads. The pandemic’s
acceleration of digital channels only exacerbated that trend.
However, while performance marketing enjoys a strong and important position in the mix,
leading CMOs recognize that it is a fine balance of brand and performance marketing that
delivers the best results, and they must fight hard against a bias toward that which is most easily
quantified. Many are bringing their customer relationship management (CRM) team closer than
ever to their media teams to see the full continuum more easily and realize efficiencies. CRM,
which is powered principally by first-party data, or customer data that the company owns (with
the consumer’s consent, of course), is the driving force for initiatives like coupons,
personalization, or email marketing.
However, that same first-party data can help generate greater efficiency in media, particularly
digital media and other addressable formats allowing companies to target on a one-to-one basis.
With third-party data declining in value as key browsers usher in rule changes by January 2022,
marketers are getting way better at engineering the online “dates” that they want to go on,
learning the new ways they need to harness the power of their own data, and developing new
strategies to partner with publishers. Even as the targeting (or dating) strategies shift with the
new rules of the game, it will be important for companies to leave space for both
brand and performance marketing given that bottom funnel strategies drive top funnel goals and
vice versa. Simply put: They work better together.
5. Old truth: Customers must sit at the heart of your marketing strategy.
New truth: Customers must sit at the heart of your customer journey.
The concept of customer-centricity is not news. However, the functional silos that interact with
customers are often disconnected because of politics, org charts, technologies, or geography. The
question is: How can we conceal these internal disconnects from the customer, who assumes that
the whole company knows them holistically? We have all called customer service and spoken to
a call center rep or chatbot that was not operating with the same information as a retail location
— and vice versa.
We must remember that marketing is often just the beginning of a relationship with the customer.
For example, in a B2C context, we go through a journey of engaging them, converting them to a
sale directly or indirectly, and then hopefully retaining them so they become advocates and
potentially open to upsells and cross-sells. Marketing must be viewed in the context of the full
end-to-end journey and, where possible, work to connect the dots.
It is not realistic to believe that the operating model for all customer-facing functions can or
should report to the same place. The notion that reorganization solves all is a common
misconception. It is far more important to look thoughtfully at the operating model and consider
the processes, technologies, talent, data models, and KPIs to find the right ways to align
objectively around the customers’ needs — then drive change accordingly.
6. Old truth: Relationships matter.
New truth: Relationships are everything.
It goes without saying that it is vital to build relationships with customers founded on trust.
Advertising, for example, makes a brand promise, and it then falls to the product, service, and
customer experience to deliver on that promise.
But Covid-19 has placed a new emphasis on relationships, particularly in B2B sales. Faced with
a virtual sales environment, teams with existing relationships have been able to maintain revenue
momentum, capitalizing on the strength of their prior bonds. In contrast, prospecting for new
customers has required an evolved set of skills focused on selling solutions, not products.
In both cases, trust and integrity are fundamental to driving market momentum. For sales and
marketing leaders in B2B organizations, this has necessitated a serious recasting of talent to
identify people best suited to driving relationships in this new world of online interactions — a
world that relies less on charm (and even an expense account) and more on insights and
solutions. Trust will be built by and rewarded to those that listen to customer needs and then craft
solutions to meet those needs.
In a B2C context, trust also plays a tremendous role. It is foundational to the value exchange
between a company and a consumer. As companies rely increasingly on personal data that they
obtain with consent from consumers, they must not only comply with the regulations on
consumer privacy and ensure that data is secure, but they also have the opportunity to consider
building even more loyalty and differentiation by designing more transparent interfaces for
privacy controls. Consumers can make better choices if they know what they are agreeing to
share with companies, and the clarity will foster deeper trust.
7. Old truth: Agility is a technology process.
New truth: Agility is a modern marketing approach.
We have heard for years that technological development benefits from agile cycles instead of
sequential or linear “waterfall” approaches. Covid-19 created an irreversible trend for marketing
to embrace a similarly nimble mentality. As the crisis has unfolded, a company could quickly
find its message was wrong or its supply chain not in a position to deliver, immediately creating
an advertising and/or public relations crisis. Imagine a commercial showing people clustered
together not demonstrating social distancing, for example. Suddenly, long-lead time creative
processes and annual budget cycles felt anachronistic while all the traditional approval dynamics
became constraining.
The fortunate outcome of the crisis was to create a mindset of marketing agility that is likely to
be permanent. This includes continuous consumer listening and demand sensing, not only for the
benefit of marketing but for the full company to capture the zeitgeist of consumer sentiment.
Meanwhile, operationally, it also means faster decision cycles and more flexibility across key
areas like creative, budgeting, and media.
8. Old truth: Your brand should stand behind great products.
New truth: Your brand should stand behind great values.
The pandemic truly challenged brand loyalty. The EY Future Consumer Index found that up to
61% of consumers, depending on the category, became willing to consider a white label product,
let alone switch name brands. That dynamic coupled with growing consumer awareness and
activism precipitated during the social unrest of 2020 should make brands very focused on the
values they express.
In fact, key themes from EY research show that while quality, convenience, and price still very
much matter to consumer choice, factors like sustainability, trust, ethical sourcing, and social
responsibility are increasingly important to how consumers select their products and services.
Marketing has an opportunity to educate the broader C-suite (and even the board) on the
importance of brand values when it comes to differentiating in a post-pandemic marketplace
where brand preferences have been upended.
9. Old truth: You need the right tech stack to drive modern marketing success.
New truth: You need the right balance of factors (including your tech stack) to drive
modern marketing success.
As an abundance of advertising and marketing technologies proliferate, it has been easy to focus
on the proverbial “tech stack” as an end-all game changer for marketing. However, having a
Ferrari that you can only drive 40 miles per hour is not much use.
For your technology architecture to drive results, it must therefore be matched with sufficient
scale in data to fuel its success, the right use cases to drive results, and the right approach to
human enablement. This latter requirement is perhaps the most important. Human enablement
involves understanding how data and technologies will be used across the organization, making
sure that people have the right skills to employ it effectively and that the right measurement
approach is in place to motivate innovation and success. Without technology, data, human
enablement and use cases in fine balance, the desired return on investment for marketing
technology will not be realized.
10. Old truth: Marketing is important for growth.
New truth: Marketing is at the center of the growth agenda for the full C-suite.
Unquestionably, there was a time when marketing was a cost center within companies for which
the principal accountability was to maximize return on investment. In tough periods when topline
results were compromised, it was often one of the first areas to get cut.
However, during the pandemic, marketing has been elevated within the C-suite as a driver of
digital transformation, a key leader of the customer journey, and the voice of the consumer — all
of which are of paramount importance to other functional leaders. Without understanding the
zeitgeist of the marketplace, in good times and bad, the C-suite cannot adjust to the threats and
opportunities at hand and successfully navigate the future.
Covid-19 has created a leadership culture of immediate collaboration focused on the urgent need
for resilience. Marketing now has the opportunity to seize an ongoing central role in that
dialogue, thereby driving the organization’s broader growth and innovation agenda.
Art and science
As marketers, we are charged with a continued blend of art and science. We must achieve the
perfect balance of humans and automation to unlock a future of better analytics and deployment
of AI at scale. We must use data as the fuel yet respect the craft of storytelling to drive
meaningful human connections. We must tread a fine line between brand marketing and
performance marketing, recognizing that we currently have a bias toward what we can readily
quantify. And we must understand what should be centralized and what should be bespoke,
identifying where consistency helps and where it hinders.
These new marketing truths embody this blend, highlighting the confluence of strategies,
operations, and technologies required to drive growth in a post-Covid-19 world. Embracing them
represents the path to pandemic recovery and long-term success. For companies and marketers
accustomed to the ways of the past, a period of adjustment is ahead. Yet even at this time of flux,
we can find familiarity and confident footing in the simplest and most critical truth of all: We
must prioritize the perspective of the customer now, next, and beyond above everything.
The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
views of the global EY organization or its member firms.
 Janet Balis leads EY’s consulting professionals in the Americas focused on the customer
agenda and revenue growth, including commercial excellence, customer experience and
product innovation and also leads EY’s CMO practice. She has also served as a partner at
Betaworks, publisher of The Huffington Post, and EVP Media Sales and Marketing at
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Balis is on the global board of the Mobile Marketing
Association and the International Television Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she is
also an advisor to the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative. You can follow her on
Twitter: @digitalstrategy.