What happened during the pandemic?

Consumers consciously or forcibly saved their income and reduced their typical purchasing behaviour.

What will happen next?

Consumers are enjoying newfound freedoms and releasing their shackles on spending as traditional retail, hospitality, tourism and other impacted industries open. Consumer confidence is high and expected to continue increasing into 2022.

What does this mean?

Industry media spend forecasts all agree total national spend will continue to increase month on month into 2022. Brands that maintained a consistent spend during the pandemic are ramping up and those that went quiet are aggressively entering the market for fear of missing out on consumers share of wallet.

What do brands need to do?

The pandemic certainly forced greater analysis of media spend and performance, which has been a positive for the industry. But, the majority of spend was focused on short-term activation.

Brands need to embrace long-term thinking and invest heavily in brand building activity to have a bigger and more meaningful presence in market.

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