Marketing Has Gone Home for Good

The Village Marketer to Emerge As Beneficial By-Product of COVID

When COVID-19 hit the headlines at the start of 2020, we had no idea how it would impact work, life and travel. For us marketers, it was in the early days that we started to come to grips with how we would have to adjust our game to match the challenge of being in isolation. In the first few months alone, I cancelled attendance at numerous conferences, events, and industry awards. Focus on our social media channels took precedence and the traditional mix of marketing methods went by the wayside.

Marketing, like other industries, experienced a paradigm shift, with our toolbox being moved entirely online. Buying behavior had been moving online for a few decades, but COVID changed B2B and B2C forever, with customers no longer able to look and touch the merchandise. It became more important than ever to relay traditional touchy feely marketing to online VR platforms. Social targeting and campaigns took center stage, like never before.

"In 2020-2021, the spectrum of professionals from CMO’s to self-employed business owners found a new challenge to new tools and methods for marketing. Traditional events and publishers faltered. SEO spending increased. Targeted social media budgets increased. Understanding how to deploy hashtags become essential. 360 experiences and VR became the tools of choice."

Companies across the globe canceled in-person events, conferences, business meetings, etc. The disruption doesn’t end there, it has changed working atmosphere (home) and expanded the traditional working schedule. For many marketers, it was adapt or die.

By staying on the top of new trends, analyzing the market insights, and understanding the growing customer demands and changes in behavior, marketers have become more productive in the small town they live in, leading many to debate the value of expensive offices and costs that go with it . So then, if working from home is here to stay, what about the idea that you have to be located in a large urban setting to be successful as a professional or company?

New technologies have made remote working increasingly feasible, and increasingly complex marketing and branding challenges can be done from home. Recently, it was found that 44% of most white collar jobs could be done from home. Before COVID-19, just 5% of workers regularly did so. That ‘working from home gap’ has now exploded: a recent survey suggests that regular remote working had increased from 6% before the pandemic to around 46% by December of 2020.

"Working from home is popular: in a recent survey, over 88% of professionals surveyed in the UK, say they do some form of it now or will be in the future. Governments throughout the world urged people to stay at home, putting our home delivery at first priority. Our kids studied and delivered homework from home. Dynamic learning and office spaces emerged as the norm."

Big cities experienced migrations away to the countryside as more knowledge-intensive economic structures emerged, dense urban areas become the topic of discussion as seemingly becoming irrelevant under the new Post-COVID conditions. The innovation benefits of proximity are important for urban economic growth and for economic growth. So a collective reorganization of work will have negative implications for urban expansion.

"Even if shifting to remote working makes individual firms more productive, cities may lose the collective benefits of traditional social and worker interaction. Personal face-to-face dynamics have adapted to Teams lunches and WhatsApp texting. If remote working becomes the norm, the implication for big cities will be profound. Much of this depends on the effects on productivity."

If marketing from home does turn out to be an effective substitute for face-to-face interaction – the results are easy to see, with traditional overhead costs saved, and using less energy to get to and from the office, as two very obvious examples. In a sense, this is the traditional model of large businesses who employed a policy of cost cutting by moving jobs out of country, or ‘offshoring’ – where businesses relocated work to other countries to take advantage of lower staff costs. If a task can be done effectively anywhere, why not in a cheaper space?

The emergence of this new 'village marketer' allows this newly empowered Work-From-Home (WFH) professional to play a larger role in businesses anywhere, in multiple time-zones. This trend, I argue, will only continue to grow, and urban spaces will become less and less needed for successful business.