Retailers: Make Spending Changes In Five Categories Post-COVID-19

The business effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will be with us for years. However, the consequences of the pandemic are not identical for all companies. Different industries and firms face disparate consumer trends, resource availability, and revenue potential during the pandemic and its aftermath. As a result, companies operate in one of three modes: survival, adaptive, or growth. To discover which mode your company is in, read “Assess Your Recovery Potential” before reviewing our spending recommendations.

Marketing and customer experience (CX) leaders at retailers control or influence a wide swath of spending, and our advice reflects that. Our research includes budget recommendations on more than 80 line items for retailers across all three operating modes. To make this huge body of advice easy to use, we’ve split it into five categories and collected them here for our clients.

  • Technology. Our technology advice includes more than 20 items related to martech, channel delivery tech, and CX-related technologies like customer feedback management and prototyping tools.
    Spending Advice For Technology (Time to read: 7 minutes)
  • Services. Our services recommendations include changes to your budgets for marketing and CX agencies and consultancies.
    Spending Advice For Services (Time to read: 5 minutes)
  • Media. Our advice on media spending contains items in the digital advertising, offline advertising, and organic/earned media categories.
    Spending Advice For Media (Time to read: 6 minutes)
  • Staffing. Our staffing-related recommendations focus on budget, not number of employees or FTEs.
    Spending Advice For Staffing (Time to read: 3 minutes)
  • Data and research. We recommend changes to budgets for competitive intelligence and benchmarking studies.
    Spending Advice For Data And Research (Time to read: 2 minutes)

Clients can dive deeper into our spending advice for their company by scheduling an inquiry with a Forrester analyst.

Not a client? Visit our COVID-19 hub for further insight on responding, managing, and leading during a pandemic.