Growing your business in a global pandemic – it sounds like a paradox, doesn’t it?
The reality is some businesses are doing very well now, and we’re not just talking about hand sanitiser manufacturers. By paying attention to changing consumer behaviour and adapting accordingly, businesses can build on unexpected growth or begin to recoup their losses from a tumultuous year and look ahead to the future.
For brands and manufacturers that can adapt to new shifts in consumer behaviour, there’s an array of new opportunities and trends to consider. With the COVID-19 pandemic unlikely to vanish anytime soon, now is the perfect time to review where your brand is heading – and make sure that it’s the right way.
What do the Australian bushfires and the pandemic have in common?
For starters, both have pushed Australians to support local businesses. Before the 2019 bushfires, supporting local businesses seemed like a nice idea but in practice, price often prompted consumers to choose cheaper options. In early 2020, communities rallied together to support local businesses and production to help regenerate local economies.
Today, a national recession has increased demand for Aussie-made products and manufacturing to be prioritised. After a five year flatline, the number of searches for “Australian Made” rose significantly in 2020, with peak popularity achieved in July 2020, shortly after the launch of Buy Aussie Now, an online marketplace catering exclusively for Australian-made products.
A growing wave of support from national marketing campaigns and growing social media accounts has further fuelled this movement.
The top emerging trends in Australian consumer behaviour
As consumers experiencing a global pandemic, almost all of us have been affected in some way. As part of our research with Australian consumers, we’ve identified four emerging themes:
- Local as the new preferred ‘premium’: following the devastating drought and bushfires of 2019, Australians are more committed than ever to supporting local businesses.
The push for local is multi-layered; to support locally owned and grown but also to contend with fears of overseas product quality and growing concerns around environmental and economic sustainability.
Data we gathered from almost 8,000 Australians from our online panel shows an attitudinal skew to this conundrum, with younger groups more open to trialling and exploring new products, and older groups more narrowly focused on prioritising Australian made products. In short, it’s a good time to be dialling up Aussie made credentials. - A renewed focus on our homes: from home-cooking to a renewed focus on DIY and home renovations, lockdown limitations may be the best thing that ever happened to our homes.
Home-cooking has gone from strength to strength. We’ve seen an increasing desire to explore our culinary limitations through new recipes, mimicking cafe-style food (like sourdough bread) and using ingredients we already have at home. Brands have been quick to jump on board, with sponsored posts and Instagram Live cook-a-longs now a regular evening activity… Now if only our cooking skills would catch up to our enthusiasm! - A new kind of thrifty attitude has emerged: due to job insecurity and economic uncertainty bulk buying, second-hand shopping and private labels have become more popular.
Supermarket giants in Australia are increasingly turning to their own private labels to fill shelves, appealing to the more budget-conscious consumer and threatening the reign of long-established brands.
With casual employment largely on hold in bricks and mortar sectors like retail, second-hand sites like eBay and Depop have experienced a global resurgence, especially among younger consumers who want ‘new’ clothes without the ‘new’ price tag. - Health concerns have extended beyond traditional perceptions: a healthy lifestyle is no longer just focused on physical and mental health; this has been broadened to include the health of the planet.
Post-bushfires, we saw an increasing demand for the government to act on climate change. Soon after, the early months of the Australian lockdown saw a decreased environmental impact on our country. Today, media coverage has favoured pandemic-related coverage over climate change, sparking renewed concern for what we’re doing to our country.
In other health news, antibacterial products have grown in popularity since the pandemic started (no surprises there!) but so has the claimed consumption of ‘longer-lasting’ fruit and vegetables including canned and frozen options. This renewed concern over factors that we control around our health and our families’ health has become more pronounced as the pandemic has progressed.
So, is your brand ready to leverage these trends?
From re-thinking your manufacturing to your marketing, there are plenty of opportunities to communicate your support for these emerging themes.
If your brand has local credentials that it can dial up, now’s the time. If environmental and economic sustainability is a pillar of your business, make sure your customers know about it. And if you’re proud of your export quality and safety, there’s no harm in communicating it.
The brands that go the extra mile to reach out to their consumers with relevant news will reap the benefits long after this pandemic is done and dusted.
