The initial public policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic was rife with chaotic decision making and wide variations in the implementation of governmental guidelines. Social distancing was the primary intervention proposed by most governmental agencies, but these measures/mandates saw mixed results because many were unwilling to comply due to factors such as politicization, widespread fake news, and lack of a scientific temper.

Brands, for their part, were quick to incorporate COVID-19-related narratives in their advertising strategies. While such advertisements likely influence brand-related outcomes (such as sales and customer awareness), it is not clear whether they impact social outcomes unrelated to the brand—the so-called “spillover” effects. In a , we assess the impact of COVID-19-related brand advertising on social distancing behavior.

We analyzed advertising and mobility data with quasi-experimental econometric methods and found that, in general, counties where brands ran a greater number of COVID-19-related advertisements showed higher levels of social distancing. This societal “spillover” of advertising was substantial. For example, a 1 percentage point increase in COVID-19-related advertising led to an average of 466 additional people (compared to 2019) staying fully at home each day. This effect was more pronounced for larger markets such as New York (6,527 people) and Los Angeles (5,612 people). Given that social distancing was critical to preventing virus spread (especially before the vaccine was developed), this spillover effect may have contributed to saving lives.

We also find heterogeneous advertising effects based on brand-level and demographic variables. Our results indicate that the effect of advertising on social distancing behavior is amplified among more educated populations but attenuated in more conservative and rural counties, which tend to be more white. Overall, our findings bear substantive implications for the power of brand advertisements to affect important societal outcomes and for government communication strategies. Our findings have implications for other public health emergencies (e.g., climate change) as well.

Could brand advertising fill the void when government agencies fail to adequately respond to public crises? The answer seems to be an overwhelming yes. A recent study by the Edelman Trust Barometer found that individuals tend to trust businesses (61%) more than governments (53%), and an astounding 86% believe that CEOs must lead on societal issues while 68% want CEOs to step in where governments fail. Our results concur: COVID-19-related brand advertising effects on social distancing behavior are almost 11 times stronger in the absence of a cogent policy response (e.g., shelter-in-place, masking) from government agencies. This suggests that brands may play a critical role in weathering public crises.

The Effect of Salience

We identify salience as one of the primary underlying psychological mechanisms that help explain our findings. When the pandemic was less prominent or salient in people’s minds, brand advertising played a more significant role in making the pandemic and its consequences more salient in their mobility-related decision-making processes. We also find that the brand advertising effects vary based on several factors such as product category and demographics. For example, ads from certain product categories such as entertainment, alcohol and tobacco, and politics have a negative effect on social distancing behavior. Further, the effects are stronger in areas with greater population and higher levels of education.

Although to a much lesser extent compared to brands, federal, state, and local government agencies also engaged in COVID-19-related advertising. But we find that government ads, overall, do not have a significant effect on people’s social distancing behavior, although the effects seem to vary from county to county.

Managerial Implications

Our study offers the following guidance to brand managers and policymakers:

1. Brands have tremendous opportunities to disseminate socially relevant messages embedded in the narratives of their TV ads to impact socially beneficial outcomes. Brands can be strategic about their advertising not only from a brand-outcome standpoint but also from a societal-outcome standpoint.
2. Government agencies may need to rethink their communication strategies when dealing with major public health crises requiring public compliance with critical safety guidelines. They may benefit from adopting alternative means of communication to minimize reactance or annoyance. This may involve collaborations with trusted public figures and/or social media influencers or offering incentives to firms in certain categories (i.e., those with increased ad effectiveness) to incorporate relevant narratives in communications directed at their followers and consumers, respectively.
3. Brand managers and policymakers could use the findings from this study to devise more efficient, targeted, and timely communication strategies to deal with future health crises. Our findings are generalizable to other public crises, such as climate change. Brand ads with relevant narratives may help increase the salience of the crisis and influence critical mitigative behaviors, such as promoting recycling and switching to clean energy.

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From: Ayan Ghosh Dastidar, Sarang Sunder, and Denish Shah, “,” Journal of Marketing.

Go to the Journal of Marketing

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The U.S. has just come through a deadly influenza pandemic, a world war, and was experiencing both substantial labor unrest and race riots across the country. It was in this context that then presidential candidate Warren G. Harding adopted the campaign slogan, “Return to Normalcy” to point voters back to “better days.” And while there were disputes about what was “better” about those days—similar to debates today—there is no escaping the remarkable similarity of these historical periods.

We don’t know what’s ahead for the U.S., as the country likely heads into a recession, constraining business investment and growth. However, we can address the question of how the pandemic has changed marketing. The CMO Survey has been collecting and disseminating the opinions of marketing leaders since 2008. This 29th edition examines how marketers are approaching strategies, spending, and organization in a post-Covid environment. Results show that some aspects of marketing have changed quite a bit over the last three years, while other aspects that changed dramatically during Covid have returned to pre-Covid levels.

These results are based on our most recent survey of 273 marketing leaders at for-profit U.S. companies, 95.6% of whom are VP-level or higher.

Hedging Economic Optimism

Optimism for the U.S. economy hit 57.2 (out of 100)—up from 50.9 at the height of the pandemic in June 2020 and the all-time low of 47.7 in February 2009 during the Great Recession. This level is lower than the 66.8 reported in February 2022, which is not surprising as many marketers are concerned about growth prospects this year and next.

Shifting Customer Priorities

While trusting relationships were most important to customers before the pandemic, this shifted to focus on product quality during the pandemic. This priority holds as most important, but low price has now emerged as a secondary priority given inflationary pressures. Both B2B and B2C buyers will be seeking to balance quality and price, as they manage budgets buffeted by inflation.

Changing Use of Channels

The pandemic has changed the use of channels—65% of marketers are now using a larger number of channels while 41% using social channels to sell. Surprisingly only 10.5% of marketers report their former face-to-face channels are now all digital, and half report their companies are returning to or opening up face-to-face channels. This finding reflects buyers’ growing appetite to embrace traditional channels after two years of all-digital interactions.

Strengthening Role for Marketing

The pandemic’s acceleration of digital marketing investments has pushed marketing budgets as a percent of company budgets up to the highest level in the CMO Survey history. This level also corresponds to the growing importance of marketing in organizations, which has increased in more than half of all companies over the last two and half years.

Flattening Spending Across Categories

Marketers report 10.4% growth in marketing spending over the last year but predict this level will decrease and start trending toward the pre-Covid level of 5.8% growth in the next year. Brand, CRM, and innovation investments follow the same pattern—all growing but reverting to levels closer to pre-Covid levels. ​Traditional advertising spending returns to negative growth after temporary lifts across the last two surveys, restarting a decade-long decline. Mobile spending as a percent of marketing budgets is flat at 13.7% and has returned to pre-pandemic levels (13.5%) after climbing to a high of 23% during the pandemic. Spending on social media has also been flat at 14%-15% of budgets over the last 18 months, coming off a June 2020 Covid splurge when spending reached 23.2% of marketing budgets. Both mobile and social continue to disappoint marketers in terms of contributions to company performance, showing no improvement over time.

Surging Use of Marketing Analytics

Spending on marketing analytics as a percentage of the marketing budget hit an all-time high of 8.9% after a decade-long level of 6% to 7%. Marketing analytics is now being used in nearly half of all marketing decisions, rising from 38% just before the pandemic. Companies have also made good progress attributing to marketing analytics to company performance. We expect to see analytics continue to rise, enabling teams to defend investments and make more precise decisions across the marketing landscape.

Growing Quality of Marketing Knowledge

Marketers have invested in building their knowledge resources through the pandemic. They have nearly doubled investments in developing knowledge about marketing strategy and operations and tripled investments in marketing research and intelligence. These investments have paid off with the quality of all marketing knowledge resources rising during this period. As one might expect, market research has also changed quite a bit during the pandemic, with more companies studying online consumer behavior (63.3%) and using more video interviews (57.8%). Only 18% are doing more text analysis, which is somewhat surprising given its availability to most marketers.

Assessing Work from Home Trends

The size of marketing organizations grew by 15.1% in the last year but is expected to drop to 7.3% growth in the next year, reverting closer to growth rates reported before the pandemic. Work from home is now prevalent across industries and economic sectors, with 57.5% of marketers reporting their teams working from home at least some of the time and 48.7% working from home all of the time. Overall, marketing leaders are confident in team productivity in both arrangements, with 50% reporting no change in worker productivity levels. Marketing leaders are more worried about company culture with more than a third reporting that working from home has weakened it. For example, 45% of marketing leaders report that young marketers are socialized less within the company in work-from-home settings. Remote working provides workers with greater flexibility but can harm engagement for these newer workers over time.

Elevating Marketing Leaders

Marketing leaders were invited to attend board meetings at a rate of 4.9 on a seven-point scale where 1=not at all, 7=very highly, with 63% of marketers reporting participation levels above the midpoint of the scale (five or more). These numbers show that marketing has a reasonably strong seat at the table at many companies.

Increasing Political and Ecological Activism

The percentage of marketing leaders who report that their companies would use their brands to take a stand on politically charged issues reached a CMO Survey high at 30.2% of companies up from the pre-Covid level of 18.5%. However, when asked about actions to reduce the negative impact of marketing-related activities on the ecological environment, levels show increases from last year but have not yet rebounded to pre-Covid levels, except in changes to the brand.

Three different reports summarize these and many other 29^th edition results. The shares key survey metrics, trends, and insights over time, the offers an aggregate view of survey results, and the displays survey results by company sector, headcount, and sales. We hope that marketers find these metrics and insights useful as they navigate a post-Covid environment and place their bets over the coming year.

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Seeing empty shelves at grocery stores, big box stores and drugstores was one of the defining moments of the pandemic, a recurring scene characterized by what wasn’t there. People were hoarding items such as toilet paper, bleach and other everyday items soon after a pandemic was declared in March 2020.

Consumers’ tendency to stockpile items during a crisis, and the resulting lack of stock, may be an annoyance for most of us, but it can have a more serious impact for others:  People who have difficulty getting out to shop because they lack transportation, have a disability, or serve as frontline public servants with inflexible schedules.

Recent research from the Journal of International Marketing has important implications for supply chain managers, retail vendors, public policymakers and others looking to prevent the next crisis-related stockpiling.

Associate Professor  of the University of Houston’s Department of Marketing & Entrepreneurship and his co-authors used country-level data on cultural values, pandemic reaction policies, and other key variables as well as global mobility data from Google, in producing their article, “

“We used consumers’ country–day movement trends to grocery stores, food warehouses, farmers’ markets, specialty food shops, and pharmacies from February 15 until April 11, 2020, using the COVID-19 Community Mobility Report dataset (Google 2020),” Habel said.

“Our analysis focused on the daily percentage change in visits to shopping destinations compared to the respective typical day of the week in early 2020 for 131 countries or regions. We matched this dataset with data on countries’ cultural values and found that consumers in countries characterized by relatively high uncertainty avoidance, low long-term orientation, low indulgence, and high individualism are most likely to react immediately and drastically to policymakers’ announcements.”

The findings may help policymakers and business managers make more informed decisions and shape communications in a way that reassures and calms consumers in future crisis situations, Habel said.

“They should also consider a country’s culture when forming expectations of consumer purchase behavior in crises and taking preparatory actions to prevent stockouts.”

Habel’s research interests include the psychology of personal selling and sales management, as well as the digital transformation of sales. He is a member of the Editorial Review Board of the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and an ad-hoc reviewer for the Journal of Marketing.

Earlier this year, his research, “Customer–Salesperson Relationships in Times of Crisis: A Power–Dependency Perspective,” was awarded first place in the “Frontlines-in-Crisis” research competition held in partnership with the Journal of Service Research and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.

He received the 2020 Marvin Jolson Award for the Best Contribution to Selling and Sales Management Practice and a 2021 honorable mention for the same award, for research titled, “When Do Customers Perceive Customer Centricity? The Role of a Firm’s and Salespeople’s Customer Orientation,” published in the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management.

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Over the past five years, the ��������� and Kantar have measured marketers’ confidence in the strength of the U.S. economy and their organizations’ spending efforts. Unsurprisingly, in mid-2020 the Marketers’ Confidence Index reached its lowest point yet: 82. Since then, however, the outlook of the economy and marketers’ perceptions have improved drastically, resulting in an index of 111 measured early this year. This is a significant rise from last year and indicates marketers are cautiously optimistic, with media, innovation and creative expected to reap most of the benefits.

Things appear to be looking up, but how does this break down into the different areas that make up the Marketers’ Confidence Index? The survey was constructed of questions on:

Consumer Spending

Although perceptions of the past six months are understandably quite negative, the high-level outlook for the next six months is back to pre-pandemic levels. 

Investment Climate

Short-term marketing budget cuts were unavoidable for many organizations during the pandemic and investments were scaled down. However, half of marketers surveyed didn’t feel it was time to cut back investment. Since the middle of last year, that optimism has grown, although it is not yet back at pre-pandemic levels.

Marketing Budgets

During the pandemic, marketing budgets were cut by a majority of organizations and major events or initiatives were postponed or canceled. The outlook for the next six months shows a lot of optimism. Marketers’ outlook on what will happen to their budget in the next six months is similar to pre-pandemic levels.

The anticipated big winners for the increased marketing spend can be found on the media, innovation and creative side. For spending on media and creative, this might simply mean a return to pre-pandemic investment levels, but for innovation this might mean an actual increase.   

Early on during the pandemic a majority of marketers had postponed or cancelled major initiatives with new campaigns and sponsorships or collaborations being a frequent victim. Based on the current outlook, it appears that interest in jumping back into sponsorships is still modest at best. 

Impact on the Role of Marketing

The pandemic undoubtedly had a significant impact on consumer behavior and raised many questions on how to best engage with customers moving forward. Although it might have raised interest in customer insights at the board level, marketers don’t think it has done much yet to raise the expected influence of marketing in the organization. 

Summary

Overall, marketers are cautiously optimistic about the near future and increasingly expect to see higher marketing budgets again. The increases, should they arrive, are most likely to be focused on media, innovation and creative. For media and creative this might mean just going back to pre-pandemic spending levels but innovation might’ve become more of a focal point than before.

Illustration by enjoys25 via Adobe Stock.

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The handoff from the last century to the next fell into place in 2020. This pivot to the future has been building since the mid-1990s, but it took the twists and turns of the coronavirus pandemic to give it the final push and lock it into place.

What the pandemic has made clear is that disruptions are the new normal. Since the turn of the century, a number of critical events have rocked society and the marketplace. Mostly, these have been difficult moments, including 9/11, the financial crisis and the pandemic. But the transformative introduction of the iPhone is probably the most disruptive thing to happen in this century.

The last quarter of the 20th century was far less volatile than the first two decades of our current one. Certainly, there were many destabilizing events and surprises, but on the whole, the frequency and magnitude of such events were temperate in comparison to the earlier part of that century, so much so that economists now refer to the period from the mid-1980s to 2007 as .

The 21st century has seen a return of game-changing disruptions. The experience of the pandemic has made it clear that the events of this century are the prelude to a coming era of disruptions, or a period during which discontinuities will be a feature of the marketplace, not the exception.

The biggest disruptive force on the radar is climate change, both from dealing with its accelerating effects and from remediation efforts to staunch its advance. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in which it concluded that climate risks represent “discontinuities” for economic growth, crop yields and labor productivity, all of which will deteriorate in non-linear ways once key environmental thresholds are exceeded. Even green energy breakthroughs constitute discontinuities of this sort. So whether things turn out for the better or for the worse, climate is an inevitable disruption. As the CFTC noted, “Traditional risk-modeling techniques … will become increasingly unhelpful guides to the future.”

Other adverse disruptions include widespread job automation, declining fertility rates worldwide, a rapidly aging global population, continuing political unrest and perhaps more pandemics. On the flip side, radical advances are expected in biomedical research, particularly after the groundbreaking improvements in data- and information-sharing that enabled scientists to develop multiple coronavirus vaccines in record time. Artificial intelligence will upend many if not all areas of knowledge work. Space exploration has been revitalized by private sector investment. The economic and technological impacts are anticipated to be no less than those of the original race to the moon.

Even before the end of this year, brands and businesses will face marketplace discontinuity. The first half of 2021 will be much the same as 2020. Many people thought the new year meant a clean slate, but everyone sees now that 2020 is in effect an 18-month year. Nothing is changing until the coronavirus is under control. Unfortunately, more transmissible variants of the virus and bungled starts to vaccine implementation mean that the pandemic will persist longer than hoped. But at some point, the rate of vaccination will finally outpace the rate of contagion, at which point an entirely new marketplace will appear almost all at once, creating a sharp discontinuity.

The first part of 2021 will be completely unlike the second part, to the point that brands and businesses must have two plans in place for 2021. This sort of standby flexibility will be essential for a future of disruptions. This means doing business with the expectation that abrupt change rather than relative stability will be the new normal.

Not everything will be different in the post-pandemic marketplace, nor will there be a wholesale return to the pre-pandemic marketplace. Rather, significant change will be found where business models are disrupted. The pandemic has meant more business model disruption than the financial crisis, during which trouble came from overextended balance sheets, not from lockdowns and limits that created irremediable impediments for certain ways of doing business.

Five pandemic-related business model disruptions will offer opportunities for forward-looking companies:

1. Fewer, bigger brands

Culling of competition will increase concentration within categories. Big companies with solid balance sheets and affordable access to capital investment will pick off the growing number of ailing mid-cap and small-cap companies handicapped by limited cash reserves and by a growing number of retail outlets unwilling to stock smaller brands. The push to assortment simplification will favor the biggest brands, resonating with consumers who are looking for stability and comfort in the form of familiarity, convenience and routine. 

The opportunity for brands requires refocusing on brand scale rather than breadth of portfolio, particularly by investing behind brands with appeals that cut across consumer groups. Businesses will need to concentrate resources behind a smaller number of bigger brands. 

The associated imperative is to overhaul high fixed-cost business models. Cash will continue to be king, putting capital-light companies in a much better position to manage assets in innovative ways. 

2. Loyalty

The continued flux within the marketplace has put loyalty into play. Everything about lifestyles has been upended, increasing the need for new solutions. Retail moves to simplify shelf assortments have untethered consumers from smaller brands and line extensions. The surge in e-commerce occasioned by pandemic lockdowns has weakened loyalty as consumers discover new brands online. Brands that have grown their customer base during the pandemic now face the happy yet unexpected challenge of retaining the loyalty of these new buyers.

Brands should look to make retention of existing customers the top priority, while also aggressively targeting consumers lost by competitors. This prioritization of loyalty reverses the trend of recent years in which penetration was the top priority for building growth. 

3. Home

At-home solutions and services will grow and permanently displace out-of-home offerings. The acceleration of digital and virtual is recentering life on distance, delivery and decentralization. Work-from-home will leapfrog as companies see that productivity is unaffected or improved, thus emboldening them to lock in cost savings from less commercial real estate. Virtual solutions will improve as technology companies innovate and partner in new ways. People will look to retain much of their newfound time and control. Innovative offerings will make work-at-home, distance learning and home entertainment better and easier. 

Remapping home-based needs, occasions and media is a critical venture for brands—many have already tackled the issue of new rituals. More importantly, many if not most of the needs gaps at home will be new and thus available as open areas of growth for first-movers.

4. Hygiene

Antimicrobial protection will be a cardinal operating requirement in every category. Health has become hygiene. Masks, distancing and handwashing are here to stay. Every category has been impacted by protocols put in place to protect against infection. Letdowns that alarm consumers about exposure will hurt brands. Consumers have learned that every category, not just traditional healthcare, can help or hurt health—so, every category can now plausibly treat health as a benefit. Central to that will be signaling hygiene.

The opportunity for brands is to incorporate hygiene into the basic brand value proposition. This means innovating around hygiene solutions as well as pushing past old category boundaries to ensure health and well-being.

5. Sustainability

Businesses will have to build back in sustainable ways. Climate issues have unstoppable momentum. The confluence of worsening natural events; a shift at the top of U.S. politics; and growing protests, particularly among younger people, ensures that sustainability will take precedence. Consumers want more corporate involvement in the public sphere, starting with sustainability. The competition for talent will keep companies focused on purpose priorities like sustainability. Investors are also demanding better pricing of risks while looking for sustainable innovations in which to invest. 

Brands must seek competitive advantage from sustainable practices, particularly in areas such as logistics, production, materials and energy. Winning companies will do more than sympathetic communications campaigns. Instead, they will formulate a long-term transformation plan to put the entire business on sustainable footing.

The stability within which brands and businesses were able to operate for many decades has accustomed business leaders to an extrapolation mindset. That way of thinking will no longer suffice. Both the robustness of business models, or the ability to absorb shocks, and the resiliency of business models, or the ability to recover from shocks, have been exposed by the pandemic as weak and unpredictable. With more disruptions ahead, companies will need to shift from extrapolation-based systems that presume high-levels of continuity to scenario-based systems that are designed for stability in the face of uncertainty. In this pivot to the future, brands become leaders by creating opportunities for success out of threats from disruption.

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The ��������� and Kantar surveyed marketers in mid-2020 to understand how they and their organizations view the role of e-commerce. While the pandemic has accelerated the importance of e-commerce for some companies, its strategic role is still unclear in others, with structural enablers acting as barriers to sustained growth.

Many headlines over the past several months have touted the “new normal” and the accelerated growth of e-commerce as a priority revenue source. However, the actual story is a bit more nuanced:

The pandemic undoubtedly accelerated a shift to a larger share of e-commerce sales, but many organizations have yet to start this journey. Additionally, while the impact of the coronavirus on e-commerce revenue has been significant for some, overall it has been modest for most organizations. The data suggests that there are significant barriers holding back success and pushing e-commerce to be a real revenue driver. Aside from the obvious issue that some organizations might struggle to free up the necessary budget to drive e-commerce growth, the results from this study identified several internal factors that will hinder success:

Incorrect Operating Model in Place

If the surveyed organizations’ leadership has made e-commerce a priority; created clear, measurable goals; and developed a channel strategy, then structure should naturally follow strategy. This is important as it enables organizational alignment to deliver sustainable performance. However, only 37% of all respondents agree that their organization has the correct operating model (people/structure/processes/tools) to be competitive within e-commerce. This may be a clear increase from 2019 (see exhibit 5-1), but it nevertheless means there are huge gains to be had by better setting up the proper model for e-commerce.

Lack of Clarity on Responsibility

Sustainable performance can only be gained if there is clear accountability for delivering on the strategy. Without this, there is risk that operationalizing the strategy fails quickly and stymies fruitful collaboration between departments, such as sales and marketing. Organizations have done a relatively decent job of assigning clear responsibilities regarding e-commerce. But despite an increase since 2019, only 47% percent of all respondents agree that it is completely clear who in their organization is responsible for all the different e-commerce efforts (see exhibit 5-2).

Insufficient Integration with Media Planning

In order to leverage e-commerce as both a brand-building and sales touchpoint, e-commerce activities and media planning should be well-aligned. This ensures that all efforts work together to increase revenue and grow the brand. Unfortunately, this is far from a given in many organizations; only half of all respondents indicate that their brand’s e-commerce content is part of their general media planning process (see exhibit 5-3).

Not Leveraging E-Commerce to Generate
Consumer or Shopper Insights

While the focus for most organizations is to drive sales, e-commerce is still being underleveraged as a tool for generating consumer and shopper insights and for brand-building activities. Only 16% of respondents rated their organization as “very good” or “world class” at generating insights out of the data collected by their e-commerce websites or platforms, or even from reviews of their products on retailer sites. Leveraging this data (in conjunction with other sources of insight) could help inform better messaging, superior user experience, product prioritization, and drive new pathways for innovation as well as other use cases.

What Next?

From an organizational design perspective, two key questions must be answered. The first: Where should e-commerce sit within the organization? This should be in sync with the role of e-commerce within the organization’s omnichannel strategy. Secondly, once the structure is set, how do we efficiently organize our processes, people and tools, and critically, ensure functions such as marketing and sales take a far more integrated approach?

Organizational change is no small initiative and we by no means intend to underestimate the effort that it entails. However, this disruption highlights the need for structure to follow strategy in order to effectively act against the organization’s priorities and find new growth opportunities. Those that are able to do this, consequently building in learning loops to create a virtuous cycle of organizational learning, will emerge as the winners, building resilient brands in the face of ongoing and future disruptions.

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Sick of talking about COVID-19 and its impacts? Maybe. But we can’t ignore this pivotal global reality and its ongoing significance on the way we do business. Depending on the specific industry sector or product, the pandemic’s effects have had widely felt consequences. Travel websites like Expedia have experienced , while online connectivity apps like Zoom have shot from 10 million daily meeting participants to 300 million in just a few short months ().

Many researchers have been scrambling to track and analyze these types of shifting consumer needs and behaviors as the pandemic unfolds. We know that when we finally emerge, behaviors will change again. Zoom is an excellent example for further examination. Will it replace face-to-face meetings altogether, as it has done during the height of the crisis? Probably not. But the crisis has indeed made Zoom meetings and calls much more acceptable—even for major presentations.

This speaks to a hybrid of behaviors in our future. If are any indication, people will return to some pandemic-forbidden pastimes with unbridled enthusiasm. However, I think we can agree that the long-term impacts—both physical and psychological—are not going away and will continue to influence customers and users.

How can brands like Zoom, which are enjoying a high level of attention, continue to ride the wave? Conversely, how can brands that have been hit hard by the crisis, such as the travel and hospitality industry, best find ways to get back on solid ground? The foundation to answering these questions lies in holistic, nimble consumer insights. Brands who hold the spotlight right now—and brands that need a bit more stage time—can use the same techniques to help them understand how to best pivot and meet future audience needs.

Have a Deep Understanding of Audience Sentiment and Behavior

This goes well beyond launching a survey and categorizing the results. You must marry multiple data sources together to create the big picture when it comes to the individuals who make up your key audiences. This can include everything from sales data to qualitative focus group feedback and even neuroscience tracking. The trick is to harmonize these varied data sources so that they can tell you what’s really important to your consumers.

Things Are Changing Fast—You Need Insights Even Faster

If you’ve felt that the last few months have been a rollercoaster, you’re not alone. Your audience feels this way too, and as their environment changes, so do their behaviors and feelings. Having the right type of system, process or technology to easily update your insights with new data, “crunch the numbers” and get instant answers is essential. You need to stay a step ahead and start being proactive, not reactive, when it comes to serving your audience.

Adopt New Metrics and Make Changes to Your Tracker

We know that one of the main barriers of making significant changes to any tracker is the trend break that ultimately ensues. If anything, COVID-19 has forced those trend breaks on us already. I’d argue that now is the time to make changes and have a measure that drives your business and works for your participants. Align your questionnaire with your business outcomes, focus on key drivers that impact these outcomes, cut all the “nice to have” questions, embrace alternative data collection options, and go from recall to in-the-moment measurement. Seize this unique opportunity to future-proof your trackers!

The pandemic has forced us to do things differently. In doing so, we’ve found ease and convenience on many fronts, such as meeting by Zoom and working remotely. For example, our team at Infotools went from a nearly 100% work-from-the-office model (pre-pandemic) to a 100% work-from-home model (height of pandemic). Following New Zealand lifting restrictions due to extremely low COVID-19 cases (at the time of this writing), we have found a balance where most people work a couple of days in the office (safely) and the rest from home. This model probably would never have been tested and approved without the impetus of the crisis.

As it becomes safe, there will be a middle ground like this for most of our activities. While behaviors and sentiment probably won’t go all the way back to pre-COVID levels, our reality will be changed for good. Brands and companies need the right way to approach and use consumer insights to understand how they can continue—or renew once again—their place in the spotlight.

Photo by rangizzz via Adobe Stock.

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Drawing on the regulatory focus theory, we categorize NPIs as prevention focused or promotion focused. Prevention-focused activities include closures (e.g., closure of schools, childcare, and nonessential businesses) and containment policies (e.g., shelter-in-place requirements, limits on private gatherings). Promotion-focused activities include providing additional resources to support public health infrastructure (e.g., meeting higher demand for physicians and hospital beds) and initiating relief efforts (e.g., banning evictions, releasing direct cash payments, running public information campaigns, contact tracing).

We assembled a unique and comprehensive data set on disease incidence and mortality, country characteristics, and NPIs across 70 countries in multiple continents. We gathered information across these countries on the policies perceived to be related to prevention- and promotion-focused NPIs as well as the countries’ susceptibility to COVID-19. We use functional clustering to group countries across diverse geographic, demographic, or economic characteristics with similar patterns of disease incidence and mortality. Countries in Cluster 1 (those with consistently low levels of disease incidence) had the highest levels of both prevention- and promotion-focused NPIs and low levels of susceptibility. In contrast, countries in Cluster 5 (those with high levels of disease incidence from the start of the pandemic) had moderate levels of prevention- and promotion-focused NPIs and susceptibility.

We employ functional regression to investigate the impact of NPIs on disease incidence. On the whole, both prevention-focused closure activities and promotion-focused relief activities were more effective than prevention-focused containment activities in controlling disease incidence. Moreover, the susceptibility toward the disease moderated the impact of NPIs on mortality. Our simulations yield insights into relative efficacy of these NPIs and help policy makers formulate pandemic response strategies to learn across clusters and cocreate appropriate policies. This study recommends policy makers to include a combination of prevention- and promotion-focused interventions to mitigate disease spread and mortality at a country level.

Full Article

Kumar, V., Ashish Sood, Shaphali Gupta, and Nitish Sood (2021), “Prevention- Versus Promotion-Focus Regulatory Efforts on the Disease Incidence and Mortality of COVID-19: A Multinational Diffusion Study Using Functional Data Analysis,” Journal of International Marketing, 29 (1), .

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Whether you are new to the Cvent platform or looking to expand your expertise, the skills gained with Cvent Academy training and certification will help you invest in your own success. We know this is an unprecedented time, and we’re working hard to make sure you have the tools you need to be successful now and in the future. As Jared Murphy explains, “As the dust settles from COVID-19, our world will have changed in so many ways. We will need stronger and higher skill sets to be successful in the industry.” The complimentary Event Marketing Strategy Certification normally valued at $295 will give you valuable skills to bolster your resume and prove your industry expertise.

“I am personally appreciative of being able to emerge prepared to take on the challenges of this change, armed with highly marketable skills,” says Esther Kincade.

What does Cvent Certification Include?

Event professionals can get certified in a number of areas to highlight their product expertise. Don’t miss opportunities to showcase your skills with our new as well as Virtual Events and Hybrid Events certifications, the Event Management, Event Management Advanced, and Mobile Event App certifications.

•New Event Marketing & Strategy certification: This new certification is designed for marketers who want to demonstrate their expertise on leveraging their event channel to generate powerful touchpoints and insights to better funnel lead performance.

•Event Management certification: This is ideal for event planners and marketers who have created, managed, and promoted an event using Cvent’s Event Management software.

•Event Management Advanced certification :This certification is designed for more experienced planners who have successfully executed multiple events using Cvent.

•Mobile Event App certification: Those who have created and managed an event using CrowdCompass Event Center, and are familiar with the features included in a standard CrowdCompass mobile app, should consider this certification.

•Venue Sourcing certification: This certification is suited to those who have proficient experience with the Cvent Supplier Network. This new certification is designed for those who have created, sent, and managed RFPs, as well as managed bid responses and awarded business through Cvent’s venue sourcing solution.

•Virtual Events and Hybrid Events certifications: These new certifications are designed for event professionals who want expand their skills and demonstrate their expertise in creating, building, and launching successful virtual and hybrid events.

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The quest for greater diversity on college campuses has long been a need, but only recently has it been backed with so much intentionality. Many institutions have pulled diversity, equity and inclusion to the top of their enrollment goals. However, for many institutions, simply increasing student diversity without addressing equity gaps may be a short-term or even harmful pursuit.

Without proper structures to support the success of diverse students, increasing diversity is simply funneling more students into an environment that may not enable them to thrive. It benefits enrollment data — but not the students. For an expanded and detailed view on this, check out the .

This approach can negatively impact retention, student success, and outcomes, along with many other factors of the student experience. Students love to share their experience via social media like @blackivystories, college search sites like and other public forums like the subreddit. that your current and future students read. What do you hope they’re saying about your student experience?

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@brownu . . . . . . #brown #brownu #brownuniversity #blackatbrown #blackstudentsmatter #blackstudentsspeak #blackivystories #blackivyleague #ivyleague

A post shared by @ blackivystories on Oct 20, 2020 at 9:12am PDT

Institutions that want long-term success and to be taken seriously for their DE&I work should dismantle established processes and practices — the ones that were most likely centered on the needs of a traditional undergraduate student with above-average means — to rebuild an infrastructure centered on the needs of a more diverse student body. Not sure what that looks like? Consider the testimonies on @dearPWI or check out for some inspiration.

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A post shared by Dear PWI (@dearpwi) on Sep 18, 2020 at 6:39pm PDT

Tall order, I know. But no one is expecting it to happen overnight. It’s a commitment to continuous improvement. And it requires well-planned communication. When done well, communication can fuel the journey — to do its part in contributing to positive change.

Here are seven practices to reach and engage a more diverse prospective student pool.

1. Define What Diversity Means to Your Institution

Greater diversity for the University of Alaska requires a different definition than for UCLA or Howard University or Smith College. Ensure that your staff knows exactly what diversity means in relation to your institution’s goals.

2. Recruit Students Like 5-Star Athletes

There is more competition than ever before for historically marginalized students. The best and brightest of these students have multiple options. They’re being offered generous financial aid packages and a considerable amount of personalized attention. If you can’t compete with financial aid, win by developing 1-to-1 relationships with them. Introduce them to their peers and facilitate conversation; have their future teachers and mentors email them directly; connect them with current students who carry similar backgrounds; invite them to alumni events and make it possible for them to attend. Go the extra mile because you’re asking them to commit to you not for a degree, but for a lifelong relationship.

3. See Them Fully and Name Them

Many students carry life experiences that have been pushed to the margins. The more you can center their experiences and make decisions that directly recognize and benefit these students, the more they’ll be able to visualize your school as a place for them. This can be as simple as including pronouns in email signatures, profiles and feature stories, or broadening the diversity of students shown in photography.

4. Understand That ‘Underrepresented’ Does Not Mean ‘Under-Resourced’

These terms refer to completely different sets of life experiences. There is overlap, but one is not inherently linked to the other. To illustrate this as clearly as possible: there are many well-resourced Black, Latino and Hispanic students. And there are plenty of under-resourced white students. Fight the urge to conflate these terms, and start thinking about them as separate populations, both containing racially and ethnically diverse individuals.

5. Adopt an Asset-Based Narrative

Asset-based narratives recognize and name the strengths of an individual beyond their academic metrics. Identifying and acknowledging an individual’s unique set of skills and personal power helps students receive communications in a new way because we’re not centered on the traditional markers of success such as GPA, AP coursework, class rank, or number of extracurricular activities. This shift in thinking can be a tricky one to master, especially considering the pervasive amount of , as pointed out by Class Trouble. Jackie Gerstein, Ed.D. offers some really helpful .

6. Don’t Censor or Filter Reality

Students today are asking for you to be straightforward with them. So stand confidently exactly where you are as an institution, acknowledge the opportunities to improve, and be forthcoming with the steps you’re taking to move forward. Students respect institutions that are honest about their situation, and your future students deserve the chance to opt-in (or out) of being part of the change.

7. Adjust Your Marketing Channels

Many deserving students and families are still . Families that do have access may be bound to mobile
devices only – PEW Research Center reports . This presents an opportunity to shift your entire enrollment ecosystem — inquiry, application, financial aid, form submission, registrar, first-year experience — from a digital-first to a mobile-first approach. Imagine trying to complete the FAFSA on a smartphone. Go through your own enrollment process entirely on a mobile device and see what opportunities you can find to enhance the experience.

Communication can be the catalyst that unites your current and future
community around a shared vision for DE&I, and it can fuel that vision by creating a desire to change behaviors. But your strongest DE&I message to prospective students is best delivered through demonstrated action, resources, and a full-on commitment to improving, not communication tactics targeted to diverse 17-year-olds.

Photo by Yingchou Han on .

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