The pandemic has transformed how people spend at home. Even as restaurants and schools reopen across the country and people trickle back into the office, consumers are still spending more time at home than they did pre-pandemic.
At a recent Brand Innovators Marketing livecast on Brands at Home, leading brand marketers shared how they are reaching consumers at home and selling products that can help make people feel more at home.
Snacking has been a huge way that people have made life at home more comfortable. Mondelēz International has identified this trend and has been communicating with consumers about the joys of small pleasures in messaging across its portfolio.
“As an insights person, it’s always interesting to see a shift in consumers’ behavior, especially with the pandemic,” said Miles Drayton, Insights Director, Global Brand Building at Mondelēz International. “I think we can break it into three big buckets. The first, when COVID hit, there was a huge lockdown, and everyone experienced extreme changes. Secondly, now, there is the new normal or the sustained approach that people are thinking about. Thirdly, how are the brands, ourselves, within the Mondelez snacking portfolio, performing throughout that entire journey. What we’re seeing in terms of consumer needs is that elements around being comforted and treated, those shot right up when it came down to the lockdown period because people felt restricted. They couldn’t go out and be in the places they wanted to be. They started to resort to the smaller pleasures, the little indulgences.”
The pandemic also raised the stakes on home decor as people’s nesting instincts kicked in and many consumers spent their energy on making cozy homes. For Parachute Home, this meant reaching a wide audience across online channels.
“Diversification shouldn’t be diverse for the sake of reducing your exposure; it has to perform at the end of the day,” said Ian Yung, VP of Growth at Parachute Home. “If you’re spending money, and Facebook is by far the most efficient, by all means, do that but at some point, channels reach the point of diminishing returns where you can’t scale as efficiently. We really push the boundaries of scale as much as we can and when we start to see diminishing returns, we move on to the next and then rinse and repeat. The thing to keep in mind is when we start investing in more and more channels, the complexity of how we are in the market gets a little bit more complex. We make sure to look at incrementality to make sure we aren’t speaking to the same people or that one channel isn’t stealing credit from another.”
