Impact of COVID-19 on Marketing Communications: New Directions in the Promotional Mix

Although the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected the economy, society, and individuals worldwide, has ended, the new world order has prompted businesses to reconsider their marketing strategies. After the pandemic, individuals’ demands, interests, and tastes changed, transforming how businesses communicate with their customers. Although advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, public relations, and direct marketing, which are the promotional mix elements, still provide a competitive advantage, new strategies have emerged with digitalization after the pandemic. CGI (computer-generated images) ads and CGI influencers have taken their place in digital advertising. Novel digital marketing strategies such as remarketing, behavioral targeting, and geotargeting have been conducted by many businesses to attract their customers. Online sales promotions such as flash sales, social media contests, and loyalty programs have gained momentum. The businesses have begun to conduct social listening to understand and manage public opinion about their brand. Public relations strategies have also widely utilized sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs. Online sales systems have been established, robot salespeople have begun to enter the market, artificial intelligence (AI) has been used for sales demonstration and new payment methods such as buy now pay later (BNPL) have been offered to consumers. Finally, traditional direct marketing has been replaced by more interactive marketing strategies and businesses have started to utilize chatbots, AI, and metaverse to make direct contact with their customers. Businesses that are unable to adapt their promotional strategies to satisfy their target consumers in the changing new economic order will fail to survive in the marketplace in the long term. Therefore, in this study, how consumer behavior changed after the pandemic and how companies adapted their promotional mix strategies will be discussed with current examples and theoretical and practical recommendations will be offered to companies to survive.