If retail spent a lot more time focusing and obsessing on changes in consumer behaviour as opposed to waiting for this pandemic to sort itself out, combined with making things incrementally better from an internal perspective we might actually start to see some green shoots of customer centric innovative thinking.

Buzzwords are everywhere today, the term omni-channel entered into the digital arena some 15 years ago as B2C woke up to the fact that they now have to cater for more than a couple of consumer touch-points.

From my experience some companies translated this term almost literally and took it as having to be omnipotent. 

Which for some meant that most of the time the marketing teams were distracted from the activities and channels that provided the most return and subsequently turned marketing into the communication department.

When I talk to the C-Suite, one of the questions I ask is for them to tell me what the last 3 adverts they saw on social media were about.

I then ask them to tell me what they did after they saw them - now we know this is a rhetorical question, but each and every time the answer is the same 'We can't remember the ads, so of course we did nothing'.

We then ask them 'why' they think other people would behave any different than them........

It's illogical, it's utter nonsense, yet these are the people who pre-Covid signed off ad spend budgets, paid lip service to the results in the board reports, and today are scratching their head because sales are going down the toilet.

Whilst social media platforms have been around for many years, it also seems that businesses are only just working out that shifting their 'advertise and promote' thinking into what is a 'social' environment isn't cutting in.

In fact it's simply pissing people off more than those stalking re-marketing campaigns your agency said would produce a great ROI. 

What they didn't tell you, or show you was the 98% of people who they annoyed, and probably managed to damage your brand integrity.

Recent studies have documented a situation in which a little more than 10 percent of consumers who make purchases on the Internet trust advertising, while the opinion of friends from social networks for almost 80 percent is decisive when choosing a particular offer.

Growth of the Internet

Simon Kemp research states

Internet user numbers continue to show strong growth as well, with our latest analysis revealing that 346 million people came online for the first time over the past year.

4.57 billion people around the world now use the internet, accounting for close to 60 percent of the world’s total population. 

The global total grew by 346 million over the past 12 months, equating to year-on-year growth of more than 8 percent. On average, this means that roughly 11 new users come online for the first time every second since July 2019.

Being social isn't all about you, it's about joining in with conversations, creating new conversations, looking for and involving in like minded communities, or creating communities that are aligned to your values and beliefs. 

Every day the number of people who literally live on social networks is growing,