© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

For over six months now, the world has been in the grip of a pandemic that has changed our lives to a large extent. As human beings and as consumers, we have learnt new habits that have become essential to the new reality. Will these habits last as the pandemic slowly washes away?

Consider the following situation. A father needs to buy a new laptop so that his daughter, who is in high school, can attend online classes. At any other time, he would have visited a retail store as he is more comfortable asking questions and choosing with the help of the salesperson rather than searching for himself online. But now, most stores are closed and even if they were open, he would not feel safe in the airconditioned store premises. So, for the first time in his life, he decides to buy something as costly as a laptop online. And the experience isn’t all that bad!

Consider another situation. The organizers of a research conference have decided to go virtual, for this year. Will they continue this into the next year when the fear of travel and social functions no longer exists? After all, an online conference can draw more participants from across the world, and saves travel and accommodation costs. Why make it compulsory for a participant from Indonesia to travel to the U.S. for a 3-day conference spending more time on travel and associated hassles than on the event itself?

These two examples illustrate a transition from the physical world to the online world that we have observed during the pandemic. As activities ranging from office work and teaching/learning, to meetings and shopping continue to move online, one starts wondering whether the physical activity or meeting really contributed all that much, and if they did, what was the direct contribution. To understand this question better, let’s consider three types of habits that consumers have been adopting over the last few months, and analyse whether these “new” habits will take hold or lose their relevance beyond the pandemic.

First, there are habits for which one had to overcome discomfort and inconvenience in order to make things work. Such habits include online shopping of goods that one used to buy in a store earlier (be it an item as costly as a laptop or as mundane as vegetables that one had to personally check for freshness before buying). Working from home on one’s laptop while wearing a headset (in the absence of the coffee machine banter) has become the new normal. For students, attending classes online and through television channels is the new reality. Seminars have given way to webinars and face-to-face conversations have been replaced by video calls.

Family get-togethers and weddings are now organized on online meeting platforms. These habits have a valuable advantage – they make it possible to overcome physical distance through online connectivity. The busy doctor in the U.K. can take an hour off to attend her nephew’s wedding in India instead of excusing herself because a wedding would have meant at least three days’ leave, not counting the travel time. This first category of new habits involves initial discomfort but pays off later as participants and organizers adjust to new modes for old activities. With experience, consumers become increasingly comfortable with these activities and find it advantageous to continue such activities even when they are no longer necessary.

Second, there are habits of compulsion that one must follow during the pandemic. For instance, hygiene habits such as washing one’s hands frequently, cleaning objects, disinfecting surfaces, mopping floors, and constantly using sanitizers are de rigeur today. These habits require people to undergo discomfort and inconvenience in order to attain non-observable benefits. We know that washing hands helps fight the virus, but we can never be sure. Other such habits support the maintenance of strict separation between the home and the external world – washing clothes and taking showers, avoiding watches and earrings. The positive impact of such habits is not immediately evident. Indeed, the intangible nature of the benefits of such habits implies that they are easy to forget when the threat of the pandemic disappears.

The third category of habits specifically pertains to dealing with the pandemic on a daily basis, often leading to observably lower quality of life than what we were used to earlier. These include regularly using masks, practising social distancing, and minimizing direct contact with others. They also include avoiding travel to the extent possible, minimizing the use of public transport, and not visiting movie theaters. These habits drive and are driven by a constant sense of caution, and they are unnatural to us. For instance, social distancing even with those who seem close to us goes against the sense of warmth that is innate to us as living beings. We are used to travelling, experiencing the world, and spending time together. Our new habits, thus, entail high negative impact on our lives even as their positive effects remain invisible. It is clear that these are habits that one is waiting to discard as soon as possible.

Most of the above habits have required us to replace old routines with new ones, and not all new habits have led to tangible benefits. Whether we will continue these new habits will depend on the extent of benefit that we observe. The first category of habits clearly results in convenience, shortening of distances, and time savings. These are likely to stay with us. The second category of habits will stay on if consumers are informed and convinced of the benefits of continuing such habits. As for the third category, these habits are unlikely to continue, as they are neither essential nor natural to human life.

Experience-related consumption habits such as visiting new places, watching movies in a theater, or watching a live performance will come back immediately after the threat of the pandemic moves on. For industries, this would generate a need to position their activities as offering something more than a traditional experience. In fact, their offerings would, in the future, be compared to that of the online world that the customer has been used to for months together. For customers who have been streaming movies to a home theater system or a wall projector at home, what could be the added benefit of watching a movie in a theatre?

In this way, we are likely to witness a major reconfiguration of industries such as retail, entertainment and education. Online learning is here to stay and will not be completely replaced through classroom learning. After all, the trend in classroom learning before the pandemic hit us had been to widen the scope of the online component. This trend will now be replaced by a shift towards continuing the online learning process that the pandemic has fueled, while engaging students in a physical classroom only to the extent that is essential. Working from home will become a viable option, no longer in the domain of flexi-work options. Similarly, growth in the use of virtual reality in various fields such as entertainment, retail, and product design will continue. When the pandemic moves away, old practices will need to find their place among the range of new practices that would have become commonplace by then.

In sum, the world after the pandemic is not likely to be the same world that we lived through before the pandemic. It is going to be an evolved version of the present reality – a new reality that combines the best of today and yesterday.