By: Ahmad Ali Gaafar, ICT Expert and Regional Marketing Consultant
The world through COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed than ever before; Such change is a kind of force majeure that disrupted severely economies worldwide!
However, enforced change is not always harmful, sometimes it is positive and optimistic!
Lots of industries have suffered rigorously from the epidemical consequences and lock-down like Tourism, Airline, Cinema, Live Sport, Oil and Gas…etc. and nothing could have been even able to extend the helping arm to save such businesses, even with the magical power of marketing!
The Marketing influence halts helplessly, when it really threatens the life of human beings!
One the other optimistic side, over and above the Life & Health Insurance industry, other ones like both Communications and Electronics Industries have managed to capture this unprecedented opportunity and deal with the situation wisely and progressively.
Such ICT industries succeeded in leading the digital transformation faster than ever before, and even in bringing years ahead earlier, than projected!
COVID-19 has pushed companies in all sectors to change the way they classically do business and steered up the industries into the Digital Transformation quicker than ever previously.
Is the prior-pandemic customer, the same like the during-crisis one?
Important question that the Marketing CMI Leaders can answer evidently, based on scientific analysis and qualitative studies they do:
The Consumer’s behavior changeability and new life styles implications have been the key drivers to different industries’ growth, de-growth or even fading out!
To have a closer eye on the ICT businesses’ growth; the Consumers have started to spend most of the time at home, either for working or just staying as part of the precautionary regulations, make them depending on the internet connectivity all the time, so such excessive data consumption is definitely in favor of the Telecom Business.
Professional and casual Face-to-face interactions are no longer like before, and so replaced with longer tele-conversations, so voice calls consumptions increased organically as well.
On the Electronics industry level, advanced Smart Phones and even bigger screen ones have now a higher demand than before; being used in running online meetings, and spending much time on SNS platforms more conveniently. So such business is now gaining higher sales revenues.
While the Consumer’s tendency turned out to be more family-oriented and people started valuing the quality time spent with the partner and dependents, s/he leans frequently to gather in front of common TV shows, so here is the role of the new bigger TV, or at least an additional device to bring.
Home Appliances Business has unprecedentedly increased during the Pandemic period as well, since people’s habits changed into storing healthier kinds of foods to boost immunity, in-house hygienic cooking than ordering foods, and stocking bigger portions of grocery and vegetables than before…etc. all such risen behaviors pushed consumers to upgrade and enlarge their refrigerator’s capacity with new ones.
It is well-defined now that the relationship between Consumer Behavior and Brand/Product Marketing is co-related; either a re-active or proactive connection:
When a brand responds to a new trend of behavior or a recently-popped up lifestyle, through embedding their products/services into such new habits, capitalizing on the advertising mediums to boost this activity, hence this is the typical role of the re-active, yet successful marketing.
Quite the reverse, the brand can subconsciously impose new standards of living as well as show up fresh life routines to make consumers’ lives easier and more convenient, so the brand’s role here is even beyond selling products, but also to decently upgrade people’s ways of living more comfortably! This is typically the moral role of creative marketing and soft influence of the brand.
In the end, post-pandemic era would be very challenging and inspiring for companies across all industries; digital transformation is no more a nice-to-have approach, it will be a must-to-do strategy; Corporate Leaders have to keep upgrading their departmental strategies; Technology, Operations, Client Service, Sales…etc. not only to meet the consumers’ aspiration, but also to form unprecedented way of living the future…
Ahmad Gaafar
Ahmad Gaafar is the current Chief Marketing Officer for Samsung Electronics Egypt, where he leads the Corporate Marketing, Retail, Business Development, Public Relations and Corporate Citizenship functions. Gaafar also handles driving the overall Brand strategy in the local market, managing the optimization of an annual budget to fortify providing maximum business provisions. Additionally, he leads the retail channel with +30% YoY growth rate, to boost the revenue.
