Discover Current Consumer Trends
In 2020 and 2021, you may have wondered what short-, medium- and long-term impacts the COVID-19 health crisis would have on our lifestyles and consumer habits.
But rather than creating new consumer trends in the US or around the world, the crisis greatly accelerated trends that were already emerging.
How about you? Did the pandemic change your buying habits? What are three habits you've adopted during this time that you think you'll keep up in the long term?
In terms of buying habits, there are five trends that draw a clear line between the pre-COVID and post-COVID world.
The Five Big Consumer Trends
Trend #1: The Digital Experience (Obviously!)
The online customer experience is now focused around three areas:
E-commerce has seen massive growth.
Social networks have become sales channels, with the explosion in purchases made through social media—a 104% increase in 2020-2021!
Click and collect: in the second quarter of 2020, companies who offered this service saw their turnover increase 2.3 times faster than others.
What about you? Have you ever bought something via social media? Or click and collect?
Trend #2: "Agile" Businesses Have a Competitive Advantage
The COVID-19 crisis demonstrated just how essential it is for companies to show their agility.
What does it mean for a business to be agile?
Trend #3: Personalization is More Important Than Ever
Customers are spending increasing amounts of time online, and they're extremely careful about what they buy. They are highly informed, aware of the wide array of choices at their fingertips. A personalized experience is essential to help nudge them toward the final step of checking out their cart.
Trend #4: Responsible Consumption is a Central Concern for Consumers
Responsible consumption is an increasingly important factor in consumer decision making.
What is responsible consumption?
Trend #5: The Secondhand Market is the Next Big Thing!
These days, the secondhand market is growing across all sectors, including major brands like IKEA for furniture, H&M’s brand COS for clothing, and Gucci opening an online shop of pre-worn items on RealRea, a luxury secondhand marketplace.
Familiarize Yourself With Consumer Profiles
The new buyer behaviors brought on by digital have given rise to some new words and acronyms.
All these acronyms, definitions and abbreviations give us a clearer perspective on how many different types of consumers and consumer behaviors exist today. It's important to have a good grasp of them so you can meet the specific expectations of each segment of your target audience.
Case Study: Home Made
What, in your opinion, is the profile of our Home Made customers? What are their behaviors? How do they interact with our fictional brand?
Bring Your Offline and Online Channels Together
Distribution channels are usually placed into two categories: online and offline.
Offline distribution refers to all physical distribution channels (stores, supermarkets, boutiques, etc.)
Online purchasing is when a commercial transaction is carried out on the internet. The purchases can then be delivered or picked up in store or at a pickup location (click and collect).
Offline and online channels are highly complementary methods of distribution. According to Expert Market, 98% of small businesses have a website. A previous study also showed that this number was significantly lower in 2021, it was only 71% of small businesses that had a website. Among these businesses, 38% say they use their website to convince others that their business is credible/trustworthy and 41% say they use it to increase their brand visibility.
The online presence means greater visibility, and the offline, physical point of sale provides an incentive to visit the store.
With complementary offline and online channels, businesses can:
make it easier for customers to access their products and services.
reach new segments of audiences.
enrich the customer experience.
boost customer loyalty.
Whatever channel they choose, you'll need to provide a good customer experience.
Keep in mind that the nature and components of the customer experience will vary depending on the type of business.
In some industries, the customer experience takes place mainly in physical stores; in others, it may be completely digital—and then there's the kind of customer experience that spans many different touchpoints, both digital and physical. That's retail!
At the core of the customer experience is the buying experience, which means "the emotions, feelings and influences felt by a consumer (in other words, a customer or prospective buyer) throughout the buying journey."
That's why, more than ever, businesses are focused on improving the buying experience. Simply put, a happy customer is a loyal customer (and can even become an ambassador).
From a statistical point of view, many studies show that attracting a new customer costs about five times more than keeping an old one. In that sense, the ideal customer experience is one that fosters customer loyalty.
Remember, the best advertising is done by satisfied customers!
Ultimately, the recent upheaval in the retail world combined with the proliferation of new distribution channels will force businesses to think of their many channels as a single, homogeneous system.
Being omnichannel doesn't just mean having a website—it means deploying one product on multiple different channels.
Case Study: Home Made
Which offline and/or online channels have you identified for our brand, Home Made? Do you think they complement one another?
Let's Recap!
There are five major trends defining consumer habits in 2021:
The growth of digital
The omnichannel experience
Personalization
Responsible consumption
The secondhand market
Your customers interact with your company via both physical and digital channels.
The study of consumer behaviors has given rise to acronyms such as:
FOMO: Fear of Missing Out
SoLoMo (Social Local Mobile): interactions taking place via smartphones
ROPO (Research Online, Purchase Offline): researching a product online before buying it in store
Offline and online channels are complementary towards each other, thus offering the best possible experience to the customer and building customer loyalty.
That's it for the first part of this course. Well done! I recommend that you take the quiz below to test what you've learned. And I'll see you in part two, where we'll start putting together your omnichannel strategy.
