“We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months,” said the head of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, back in April 2020. Since that seminal moment when the world locked down in the face of the Covid pandemic, this digital acceleration has only continued, as companies sought to accommodate fundamental changes to their customers’ behaviour.
It has now become amply clear that those customers were changing not only the way that they shopped and used services, but also the way they looked at the world. According to a 2021 report by the consultancy Accenture, the pandemic compelled consumers – en masse – to shift their expectations more rapidly and completely than at any other time in history. The report included the results of a survey of more than 25,000 consumers across 22 countries, half of whom said they felt the pandemic had caused them to re-evaluate what is important to them in life, and that they would abandon brands that didn’t support their new values.
