Virtual goods are moving beyond art and fashion to enhance self-expression for digital avatars.

“Basic everyday household goods, along with consumer electronics, are two of the product categories consumers are continuing to buy at both brick-and-mortar and digital retailers during the pandemic,” said Nicole Perrin, eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence.

Adjusting messaging at different touchpoints is one way to address this, as well as using branding to convey values or just a good deal. Another way to ease point-of-purchase friction is to encourage digital wallet use. Online Buying Is Here to Stay. The pandemic has accelerated Gen Z’s digital buying behaviors.

It wasn’t just working from home that boosted the computer products and consumer electronics industry, but it certainly played a major role. Office for National Statistics (ONS) data from May 2021 indicated that about a quarter of workers in the UK had worked at home at some point in 2020. Among Londoners, that figure was nearly 50%.

Adults ages 35 to 44 and those in affluent homes were leading adoption, with ownership reaching 56.7% and 65.5%, respectively. However, TV streaming sticks and similar devices were also more widespread this year than last, as penetration approached 28%. Print media still commanded sizable audiences, especially among older residents.

You’ve probably heard about how the pandemic has had an outsize economic impact on women in the workforce—and not in a good way.

Those two categories had good years only because of the pandemic, as consumers spent less on restaurants and more on groceries and spent to install or refurbish home offices. This year, apparel and accessories sales will rebound from a 9.6% contraction in 2020 to a 10.5% increase in 2021 as social life settles into a year of near normalcy and clothes shopping picks back up.

The areas that grow and thrive are a good indication. Waze is a big player in the out-of-home (OOH) space. What’s the strategy there given that people are spending more time at home? There was a notion in a couple markets to make people aware that we’re here to help them get through the new world and that we really understand new patterns as they’re exploring.

YouTube doesn’t release data broken out by device, but ad numbers are a good approximation of where users are watching. These ad dollars indicate that a lot more YouTube viewing is now happening on TV screens—a trend that was accelerated by the increased amount of time spent at home during the pandemic. And, YouTube was already, according to our estimates, the largest CTV ad seller last year.

Retailers are in a relatively good position when it comes to the identity crisis and the overall deprecation of third-party data. Retailers have logged-in users, and they have clear reasons for obtaining personal information from consumers (for example, so they can charge for and ship goods). And they own this data themselves and can use it to help brands reach shoppers for a win-win result.

Retail ecommerce sales include sales made on Grupo Éxito’s web properties and digital catalogs, as well as its marketplace, home delivery, Shop&Go, click-and-collect, and B2B virtual operations. Read Next. Listen Next. Sources. Americanas S.A. Carrefour Brasil. Cencosud. Dafiti. Falabella. Grupo Éxito Colombia. Liverpool. Magazine Luiza. Mercado Libre. Ripley. Via.

In June, the tech giant partnered with Coinbase, so customers of the exchange can use their Coinbase ZCard to pay for goods and services through Google Pay. Users could also earn crypto rebates of up to 4%. In October, a partnership with Bakkt let the exchange’s customers purchase goods and services using select cryptocurrencies through their Google Pay wallet.

JPMorgan Chase: Marianne Lake, who is co-CEO of the bank’s consumer- and community-banking unit, said that Chase is thinking about jumping into the BNPL space and that it has a good shot due to its lending experience. Chase already offers a credit-card product that’s similar to BNPL.

To accommodate closures of pick-up points in physical stores, one-third offered free or discounted home delivery. Many also felt obliged to extend the period allowed for the return of goods. This is typically 14 days; many retailers were prepared to allow 30 to 60 days. All these measures erode profit margins.

Grocery ecommerce is having a moment. Already at an inflection point prior to the pandemic, the migration of essential goods to online has accelerated this trend by three or four years in the span of three or four months.

Consumers can’t leave home to assess potential purchases in physical stores. For some types of goods and services, such as books and other cultural items, software downloads and financial services, this may not matter much, but for many categories, the inability to see or collect items in a store is a deal-breaker.

So, sensorial skin care and hair care with good, efficacious results continue to be really important. How has the focus on self-care changed your marketing priorities in recent months? When the pandemic started, the first thing we told ourselves was that we are a brand that came out of purpose, and we wanted to be a friend to our consumers.

The smallest merchants will be especially interested, as the solutions can be used in small stores, at flea and farmers markets, or for home-based services. This is bringing softPOS to the fore: Startups like Paymob and MagicCube are partnering with larger providers to pilot the technology with small merchants in the US and UK, respectively.

Just 1 in 4 (24.7%) people over age 65 told Civis Analytics they’d used a remote monitoring device such as a wearable, a home health device, or a smart medical device like internet-connected blood pressure cuffs.

Low-income households are prioritizing goods. In May 2022, high-income households were 35% more likely to spend more on goods than experiences, whereas low-income households were 41% more likely, according to data from Deloitte’s Global State of the Consumer Tracker. Higher-income households are starting to react to increasing prices.

The news: American Express expanded its partnership with startup Nova Credit so US immigrants can use their home-country credit history to apply for Amex cards, per a press release. Nova Credit helps extend credit access to immigrants, whose credit histories traditionally aren’t transferred into the US financial system.

Facebook has been good, but our demo has been more on Instagram. We are also shifting a lot of testing to TikTok and LinkedIn. LinkedIn especially has been big for us. We started a blog, and we’re doing more long-form content now that people are home and interested in hearing from the brand founders.

Marketer Takeaway: Amplifying already-trending creator content can help brands reach TikTok audiences in a way that feels native to the platform and lets them use TikTok’s ad targeting tools to home in on their key audiences. It also cuts out the need for marketers to make their own creative. TikTok rolls out Promote ad option.