Marketing at the Crossroads: Digital transformation and consumer behavior in times of COVID-19

The era of digitalization brought with it numerous changes in typical market and consumer dynamics, replacing physical media (and opting, for the most part, for a hybrid operation between online and in-person) with digital channels where the interaction between brand and user is direct, but above all, measurable. This led to the wave of new platforms responsible for facilitating the "buying and selling" process, which led brands to find themselves under pressure to adapt to a more demanding consumer who spends more time in front of screens and, therefore, has the flexibility to search thousands of sites for the options available to purchase the same product or service. This shifted what was previously understood as a "need" to a practical focus of "convenience," a focus of greater demand in the face of competitiveness.

This is how digital marketing begins to take a strong role within the advertising sector which, although it had already been developing over the years, overnight it became permanently consolidated as the main tool for advertising, with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a result of which the restrictions, confinement and health measures required globally forced consumers of the traditional format to move to a digital format through virtual platforms that brought the user closer to everything that billboards, radio or the press had to stop producing due to the crisis, hence companies (SMEs or MSMEs) also had to adapt to a format of greater commitment, promoting innovation and generating a genuine feeling of connection, after the loss of company, which is why this text aims to demonstrate the impact of a forced digitalization that marked a before and after in what was known as the "new normal" caused by a stage now divided into the pandemic and the post-pandemic.