“Everything’s going to be alright,” wrote the IPA’s director general in early December. Marketing budgets are up, having received the biggest boost in four years, the economy is in recovery mode and the vaccination programme has been a roaring success… and then came Omicron with its fresh wave of restrictions.
Despite being ordered to carry on as normal, Christmas parties fell like flies and the back to the office campaign, which was gathering significant momentum, has been abandoned as hordes of workers flee back to the relative safety of their home working space.
As we enter our third year of Covid, uncertainty remains the order of the day. But this is no longer our first rodeo and the best way to deal with the uncertainty is to tackle it head on and focus on the things that can be controlled.
For marketers this will mean marketing effectiveness – delivering better ROI by investing in the areas that will bolster the bottom line.
The home-movers market for instance. They are currently the most valuable consumer group in the UK. People who move house, spend money. Fact. They spend it on a huge range of things; new furniture, new floors, doors and windows, new kitchens and bathrooms, home improvements and DIY, home furnishings, new plants, shrubs and outdoor furniture, technology, a new car, new memberships, energy saving devices… the list goes on.
Research shows that homeowners spend an additional £13,000 within a year of moving into their new property. On average the most expensive single property improvement was made on new furniture (£1,251.63), followed by a new kitchen (£1,185.86), a new bathroom (£1,115.18) and energy efficiency (£1,021.72). Additionally, a further £792 was spent on smart devices, like the Amazon Echo or Nest, although Londoners spent more than double this amount (£1,793) on home tech. This spending equates to 3% of GDP.
In 2021 more people bought and sold a house than ever before (over 1.5 million). In June, the number of transactions taking place in the property market were almost 100% higher than historical norms and, despite the completion of the stamp duty holiday, the owner-occupied residential market continues to deliver significant levels of activity considerably exceeding the volumes seen in the near-normal market conditions back in 2019.
Compared to then, the number of households in the home moving journey is up by over 14%, with nearly 1 million households about to move or having recently moved. Forecasts for 2022 predict sustained momentum with over 1.2 million house moves anticipated. This means that over the next 12 months there is a market worth more than £13bn just waiting to be tapped.
For savvy marketers, the smart money in 2022 will be on creating a baseline of marketing activity that is guaranteed to deliver results. This means that no matter what is around the corner they can be confident that they will be delivering results.
Colin Bradshaw is chief customer officer at TwentyCi
