In March 2020, everything changed. Marketing budgets were slashed, then reallocated. Digital adoption accelerated by years in weeks. Consumer behavior shifted overnight. The playbooks that had worked for decades suddenly didn't.
Now, two years later, enough time has passed to distinguish between temporary pandemic effects and permanent structural changes. As some things return to pre-pandemic norms, others clearly aren't going back.
For marketers trying to build strategies, understanding this distinction is essential. Betting on temporary changes reversing — or permanent changes fading — means building on unstable foundations.
Here's our assessment of what's truly permanent in marketing's post-pandemic reality.
Digital Adoption Isn't Reversing
This seems obvious, but the depth of the shift is still underappreciated.
The pandemic compressed roughly five years of digital adoption into about five months. Consumers who had resisted online commerce, virtual services, and digital communication suddenly had no alternative. They tried it, found it worked, and changed their preferences permanently.
The numbers are stark. E-commerce market share jumped from 16% to 21% in 2020 alone — a gain that would typically take three to four years. Telehealth usage increased 38x from pre-pandemic levels and has settled at roughly 13x those levels. Video calls, once a novelty, are now standard.
Some of this adoption will naturally moderate. Consumers missed in-person experiences and are returning to them. But they're not abandoning digital — they're integrating it. The new normal isn't digital or physical. It's digital and physical, with consumers expecting to move fluidly between channels.
For marketers, this means digital capabilities are now hygiene, not differentiation. The baseline expectation has moved. Brands that treated digital as optional now look outdated.
Consumer Privacy Expectations Are Permanent
The pandemic accelerated a privacy reckoning that was already underway. Increased time online made consumers more aware of tracking and data collection. Regulatory pressure intensified. And then Apple dropped the hammer with iOS 14.5's app tracking transparency.
The result: a permanent shift in what data marketers can expect to access and how they can use it.
Third-party cookies are dying. Cross-app tracking is restricted. The era of frictionless consumer tracking is ending. And this isn't reversing — if anything, regulation and platform restrictions will continue to tighten.
This has profound implications for marketing strategy. The tactics that worked in the era of abundant third-party data — programmatic advertising based on extensive tracking, lookalike audiences built on cross-site behavior, attribution models that followed the customer journey — all need rethinking.
The winners in this new environment are investing in first-party data strategies: building direct customer relationships that generate owned data. They're focusing on contextual advertising that doesn't require personal tracking. They're developing measurement approaches that work in a privacy-constrained world.
The Trust Premium Is Real
Consumer trust, always important, became explicitly critical during the pandemic.
Faced with genuine health anxiety, consumers gravitated toward brands they trusted. New purchase relationships felt risky. Familiar brands benefited from the uncertainty.
This trust premium hasn't faded as anxiety has decreased. If anything, it's intensified as consumers became more discerning about which brands deserve their attention and money.
Building trust requires consistency over time — there are no shortcuts. Brands that invested in trust-building before the pandemic had accumulated an asset that paid dividends during it. Brands starting now face a longer road.
But trust is buildable. It requires authentic communication, reliable delivery, and genuine customer care sustained over time. The brands investing in these fundamentals are building competitive moats that may take years to mature but create genuine long-term advantage.
Content Is Consumption, Not Just Marketing
The pandemic turned everyone into content consumers. With limited options for entertainment and socialization, screen time exploded. And while screen time has moderated somewhat, content consumption expectations have permanently increased.
This matters because consumer attention patterns have changed. Passive advertising interrupting desired content is increasingly ignored or blocked. Content that is itself the desired product gets consumed.
The line between content marketing and entertainment has blurred to near-invisibility. The brands capturing attention aren't running advertising campaigns — they're creating content that competes with professional entertainment.
This raises the bar dramatically. "Good enough" content marketing no longer works when competing against unlimited entertainment options. The content has to be genuinely compelling — useful, entertaining, or emotionally resonant — or it gets ignored.
Work From Anywhere Changed B2B Marketing
For B2B marketers specifically, the shift to remote and hybrid work has permanent implications.
Traditional B2B marketing assumed knowledge of where buyers worked. Account-based strategies, physical location targeting, and office-based events all depended on workplaces being knowable.
That assumption no longer holds reliably. Decision-makers work from homes, coffee shops, and distributed locations. They may not have a primary office. Their physical context is unknowable.
This shifts B2B marketing toward digital-first approaches: virtual events, digital content, online community building. It also increases the importance of individual targeting over account-based approaches — reaching the person matters more than reaching the company when people are dispersed.
The B2B companies that have adapted to this reality are seeing strong results. Those still optimizing for an office-centric world are increasingly out of step.
Community Beats Broadcast
Perhaps the deepest shift is in how brands relate to customers.
The pandemic's isolation made community desperately valuable. People sought connection. Brands that created genuine community — spaces for customers to connect with each other, not just with the brand — built powerful loyalty.
This community-orientation isn't reversing. Having experienced what meaningful brand community feels like, consumers expect it. Broadcast messaging from brand to customer, without opportunity for connection and conversation, feels hollow.
Building genuine community is hard. It requires facilitating connections, not controlling them. It requires vulnerability about brand limitations. It requires ongoing investment without guaranteed short-term returns.
But brands that have successfully built communities have something their competitors can't easily replicate: a group of people who care about each other and about the brand's continued existence.
The Bottom Line
The pandemic didn't create new trends so much as accelerate existing ones. Digital adoption, privacy constraints, trust premiums, content consumption, work flexibility, and community orientation were all emerging before March 2020. The pandemic just pushed them forward by years.
For marketers, this means looking at these shifts not as pandemic effects to wait out but as permanent changes to build around. The strategies that work in the post-pandemic world are fundamentally different from those that worked before.
The adjustment isn't optional. The world has changed. The marketers and brands that have accepted this and adapted are thriving. Those still hoping for a return to the old normal are falling behind.