The Covid pandemic has created a new kind of customer, according to a trend report. This new customer is digital-savvy, not always true to a single brand, and leverages new paths of research compared with customers to date. Discover here how marketing needs to adapt in order to reach this customer type.
Digital-savvy, but unpredictable
Only if you know your customers can you adapt your marketing to precisely cater to their needs. The Digital Trends 2021 survey from the software company Adobe has now shown that a new kind of customer has crystallised out of the Covid pandemic and its resulting restrictions, one which has never existed before. The survey’s authors describe this customer as being experience-centric and digital-savvy on the one hand, and yet unpredictable and quick to lose on the other hand.
This customer type is characterised by a completely new buying behaviour: other baskets, other paths of research and other product interests. And more than one-third of the over 13,000 marketing and IT experts surveyed stated that customers have become less loyal to a product or brand since the beginning of the pandemic.
This also goes for the less volatile B2B industries such as the manufacturing industry. In the B2B segment, 57 per cent of the decision-makers surveyed across all industries stated they experienced unusual growth in the number of digital customers, 32 per cent recorded unusual fluctuation in customers and 51 per cent noticed unusual purchasing behaviour amongst existing customers.
Understanding new customer types thanks to fast insights
For marketing, this means: the data and the behaviour of customers have to be captured and processed faster; agility and fast responses are more important than ever. In reality, however, it is precisely here where the hitch is: only 23 per cent of companies consider these aspects to have a “very high” priority. Yet such insights strongly contribute to delivering satisfying brand experiences, as the trend report reveals.
Competitive advantage: a well-planned customer experience
For successfully communicating with this new type of customer, a strong customer experience (CX) based on insights is a true competitive advantage. Companies that have focused on well-planned customer experiences, according to their own statements, were able to outmatch their competitors in the second half of 2020 with a much better result.
This is also illustrated by customer satisfaction: customers of companies with comprehensive insights into the customer journey are more than doubly satisfied with the digital brand experience compared with customers of companies with fewer insights into user behaviour (71 per cent vs. 31 per cent).
Need to create positive customer experiences
However, the path to an optimal customer experience seems to be quite long in reality: 59 per cent of those surveyed in EMEA admitted that they would be frustrated if they were to experience their own brand’s CX as a customer.
Nearly two-thirds of so-called mainstream participants said that they would “likely” or “with certainty” prefer other brands if they were to be customers of their own digital CX, as this is not thoroughly thought out. These mainstream participants include companies who would estimate that their CX approach lies between “not complete” and “somewhat far advanced”. A total of 82 per cent of all those surveyed see themselves in this group.
