Understanding Consumers in Preparation for the Post-Covid Era

In the COVID-19 crisis, if you are not working for one of the few lucky brands that experience organic sales increase, you should focus on increasing brand awareness instead of swimming against the current. Increasing brand awareness will have both short and long term effects among a target audience. In the short-term, consumers will be more receptive to outside communication efforts, due to the lack of marketing cacophony. Mid-term benefits for brands will be the expected shopping craze after the crisis and in the long-term, they will start a relationship with a totally new consumer segment.

Business’ slowing down could pose an opportunity for brands. Brands could finally take a step back to observe how to optimize and better their operations. As Uservision, we have observed that brands usually tend to reach out to pre-defined customer segments and don’t improve their learnings for a very long time. Moreover, in today’s ‘personalized’ world every customer wants to feel ‘special’. Global brands like Apple, Netflix, Spotify, and Instagram have set a very high standard for a personalized experience and now consumers are not willing to settle for anything less. At this point, one must note that for consumers, the personalization doesn’t have to be perfect. Primarily, they look for a customer-centric mindset.

To be proactive at a time of crisis, brands can dive into behavioral and need-based segments beyond simple demographics to thoroughly understand who their customers are. To be able to put yourself in their shoes, instead of anchoring to the brand’s vision and goals, you should listen to consumers’ voices and create new norms.

Brands that understand novel consumer segments can introduce themselves and navigate in this uncharted territory. To make this introduction as smoothly as possible, brands should focus on helping consumers experience and interact with the brand.

In order to achieve distinct interactions with different consumer segments, brands can have promotions, provide free products and services, form appropriate media planning strategies.

The interruption of modern-day communication bombardment during the Covid-19 crisis gives brands an opportunity to weed out the competition and popularize themselves. Through perpetual communication during the crisis, brands can start ahead of their competition after the crisis.