Happy new year! To say the world changed in 2020 is obvious. And it’s clear that 2021 is off to a similarly wild and turbulent start.

But while the science isn’t conclusive about how long it takes to develop a new habit, we have lived through the pandemic and this transformative period long enough to shed old habits and develop new patterns and routines—good, bad or ugly. So, like any strategist, I chatted with teammates to reflect on what’s truly changed from last calendar year and what might stick to shape the new one for individuals, brands and organizations.

TL;DR: In a year that seemed to stand still for many, the most notable shifts weren’t new, but rather existing trends that accelerated at warp speed.

Goodbye, digital and physical. Hello, integrated living.

Brands have long drawn a distinction between digital and physical worlds. And individuals have often curated a version of our online selves that may not completely reflect the offline reality. While these lines have been blurring for some time, they completely collapsed once the world went into lockdown and we collapsed onto our couches. In 2020, we changed how we lived: we brought bosses and teachers into our homes via video chat, we shopped for groceries online that were delivered to our doors, we worked out in our homes with others across the country. No experience worked without the true integration of digital and physical.

Even if 2021 doesn’t look exactly like 2020, the one constant is that change and emotional intelligence (or EQ-led leadership) are proven to build resilience. This doesn’t mean we abandon data or our “hard skills.” Instead, leading brands and organizations will understand how to listen and learn, find moments of emotion and empathy (at scale) in the data and continue to lean into what might feel uncomfortable. “We have to remember that the people and cultural factors are probably the most critical ones for success,” says Bruno Rebouças, Managing Director LATAM at MightyHive.

Whether you felt like everything came to a halt in 2020 or wouldn’t stop spinning, you made it to 2021. Breathe, but don’t rest too easy—for the strategists, designers and those who wake up every day to create the best experiences for others, this year is poised to be another one of change. Whether serving their teams or their customers, brands and organizations must know how to be resilient, nimble and empathetic. Fresh off a holiday break, I’m excited to explore and create better ways of living, learning, working and connecting with people at home and afar. Let’s get started!

This article contains contributions by Sarah Higbee, John O’Rourke and Joseph Sutton.

Now, expectations are that winning experiences are truly integrated, adaptive and convenient. Even when it will be safe to socialize less than six feet apart, our hunch is the home will remain a critical hub that connects every aspect of our lives: Warner Bros. is eschewing theaters to premiere new movies at home through HBO Max, dating apps are connecting people from afar and virtual events offer greater accessibility than traditional, in-person counterparts. To continue to deliver on these new expectations of service, brands and platforms must adapt and rethink how, when and where consumers make decisions across increasingly nonlinear journeys—what Google calls “the messy middle.”

Michael Leen, SVP Growth and Partnerships at MediaMonks, recently discussed this new reality of everywhere commerce. “What differentiates brands and sellers today is their ability to show up where their customer is, whether it’s the dot-com, on TikTok or at an event. Brands must make sure they are using all the channels that are appropriate in ways that resonate with their customer.”

As marketers and designers, we must double down on human-centered design—and perhaps even think about home-centered design—by understanding how the present moment continues to shape content and connection.

Goodbye, surviving. Hello, thriving.

We’re living through a pandemic. We have to talk about our health—which includes physical, mental and emotional health. All too often, in US culture, “I’m busy” also signals “I’m important.” But in 2020, busy reached a breaking point without boundaries or rest, resulting in unprecedented burnout: for parents, for healthcare workers, for teachers and any and all essential workers (we see you, and we’re grateful). We couldn’t ignore our rising mental health challenges any longer.

Leading organizations understood this reality wasn’t just an individual challenge but also an organizational one stifling creativity, collaboration and problem solving, to name a few. With that, 2020 was the year we (finally) began to normalize mental health and take control of all aspects of our well-being—a priority that Firewood Co-founder and President Lanya Zambrano has championed by sharing her own journey.

Stressors won’t vanish when the pandemic ends. The good news is the rise and adoption of digital tools can help us better manage our health as individuals, like seeing a doctor via video chat with ease. But we’re also hopeful the conversation in 2021 moves beyond an afternoon of self-care to cultural norms of flexibility and balance.

Goodbye, traditional classrooms. Hello, lifelong learning.

Learning looked different this past year. So much so that metrics we’ve traditionally used to measure success (classroom size, test scores, etc.) essentially lost their relevance. What emerged in 2020 was something closer to the learner-centered approach that’s been championed for some time. Opportunities for anyone, at any age, to learn from anywhere with an internet connection took off: time spent learning on professional development platform LinkedIn Learning has tripled during the pandemic, while MasterClass saw a double in sales and raised $100 million to fund new content.

But the ways that education changed in 2020 weren’t all positive. Pandemic lockdowns exposed a digital divide that threatened to set underserved students and communities back further and showed how ill-equipped our institutions are in engaging students virtually when needed.

As we look to this new year, there’s an incredible opportunity to imagine how we learn (anywhere) and who is a student (everyone) when we close the digital divide once and for all and consider new ways of learning. Might successful learning look like the Peloton model: personalized, entertaining and engaging group lectures supported by smaller discussion groups and communities?

“I believe that the most effective edtech experiences are built based on in-depth knowledge of what drives and engages kids and young adults,” says Vinne Schifferstein, Managing Director at MediaMonks Australia. “Only by truly stepping into their shoes can we motivate them to learn in a way that suits them best, ultimately resulting in better learner outcomes.”

I am not an educator and acknowledge that different solutions suit different ages and stages. But whatever this next year looks like, the opportunities for partnership, content and learning seem limitless.

Goodbye, geographical borders. Hello, shared values.

For the lucky industries and professionals who can work from the safe confines of home, how we work changed in 2020. And whatever model emerges (3-2-2 or others) this year, a distributed workforce will remain. Unrestrained by borders, the distributed workforce opens the door for more diverse backgrounds, experiences and perspectives, which will not only create better work but also means teams can source the best talent from all over the world.

But without shared physical spaces, norms or experiences that hold everyone together, leading organizations must instead rally around a set of common goals, values and purpose to create a community. Our values of humility, authenticity, inclusivity and responsibility have not only kept us connected and grounded throughout an unprecedented year, but have served as guideposts for designing content, programs and events across S4Capital—with a unified digital home on our bespoke internal platform, the Shift.

While this is not a new idea, it has become a cultural baseline to set future organizations and leading brands apart.

Goodbye, small talk. Hello, emotional intelligence.

Small talk changed in 2020. In a non-scientific, anecdotal survey of teams and client partners, platitudes about the weather and generally forgettable, time-filling conversations disappeared. They were replaced with conversations of grief, social justice, and wildfires (many of our teams live on the US west coast) because ignoring these topics felt tone-deaf. We had tough conversations. And consumers and communities expected brands to show up meaningfully to support their communities, customers and employees alike.

Havaianas is a brand for everyone, owing its early success to the working class. But over the decades, Brazil’s biggest fashion export really has delivered on its promise that there’s a pair of flip flops for everyone, upscaling the affordable yet durable traditional pair into a wide range of footwear with broad appeal.

While the brand has achieved icon status in Brazil, Havaianas is a brand with a significant global reach. Circus Marketing, who joined our monastery earlier this year, has greatly supported and enhanced Havaianas’ efforts to accelerate success around the world, helping audiences everywhere come to know the brand like the Brazilians do: a truly democratic brand that stands for the people.

Circus and Havaianas march in perfect sync thanks to their close connection in Havaianas’ internal creative team, Hana. Hana is built for digital, and was established after Havaianas realized the opportunity to increase their digital investment to make creative more effective. While Hana is an internal team, its efforts are accelerated and supercharged by Circus–at home and around the world. Here’s how.

Legitimizing the Brand Story through Collaboration and Activation

A lot of what makes Havaianas such an iconic brand is through its marketing—not just in the messages it puts out, but even in how it produces work internally to live up to the brand image.

Speaking at a Brand Innovators event presented by MediaMonks and Circus centered on multicultural marketing, Havaianas CMO Fernanda Romano said, “By design we’ve made it a rule internally that we need to bring representation to the table. Our partners know…don’t even bother to bring a bid to the table if you haven’t bid with all sorts of people.”

The brand is further transforming itself to support marginalized communities: most recently, Havaianas launched its “All Love is Welcome” platform to celebrate LGBTQ+ pride. This is more than just a campaign: it’s a year-round commitment that demonstrates the brand’s role in supporting the LGBTQ+ community in an impactful way.

In addition to launching a Pride-themed line that will sell year-round, Havaianas is allocating part of product net income to All Out, an organization that operates locally and globally to advocate for the community. Havaianas will also cease categorizing by gender and will increase the size range for designs to make them more inclusive. “We made a point that representation wasn’t a checkmark to tick off,” Romano told the Brand Innovators audience.

To help launch its “All Love is Welcome” platform, Havaianas worked with Circus to host a virtual celebration of love. Three couples—and their guests—virtually came together to marry, renew vows and celebrate the spirit of Pride at home. In addition to real marriage officiating, couples were treated to serenades from Flutua and Johnny Hooker, who belted out an anthem to inspire and celebrate the LGBTQ+ community. In addition to the hero video that captures moments from the virtualized event, Havaianas is rolling out documentary-style shorts that dive deeper into the lives and stories of the featured couples for a global audience.

Depicting real stories was key to the campaign’s success and spoke to the challenges that LGBTQ+ people face in lockdown. “One of the creatives who worked on the campaign said that one of her friends had just come out to his mother because they were living so closely together now,” says Luciana Haguiara, Executive Creative Director at Circus. “Some people are arguing but many are becoming much closer with their loved ones, are starting to accept things and being more careful with one another’s feelings.” She notes that Sao Paulo has one of the biggest Pride parades in the world, a claim that the Guinness Book of World Records has confirmed from 2006 to at least 2016, making it incredibly important to still offer that celebratory space virtually.

Making the Pivot to Virtual

The Pride campaign is just one example of how Havaianas has rapidly virtualized to offer the brand’s trademark fun, summery spirit. Its Mother’s Day campaign, which depicts mothers in recognizable situations at home (keeping their kids entertained, being separated from family and more), was built out of insights gained from the brand asking how mothers feel during COVID-19.

Perhaps more excitingly, the Hana team also quickly pivoted its content strategy to host virtual events that provided its audience fun and comfort while at home. Havaianas very much represents the outdoor lifestyle, so the challenge became: how do we activate the brand while the majority of its customers are indoors and at home?

Circus’ idea was to help Brazilians continue to enjoy life through a series of livestreamed, at-home concerts featuring Marília Mendonça, Thiaguinho and Big Brother Brazil star Manu Gavassi. In Mendonça’s performance alone received over 11 thousand likes, three thousand posts from viewers showing off their Havaianas, and three million simultaneous viewers—a YouTube record that hasn’t been beat.

And as Havaianas continues to expand around the globe, the brand is focusing on virtualizing commerce as well. Its “Let’s Summer!” campaign and new Tmall store in China exhibits how the Havaianas really is for everyone, no matter where they are in the world. The store serves as a best-in-class example of how a brand can modernize and optimize its digital storefront by following the full customer journey.

Havaianas was integral to normalizing flip flop use out of the home in its early days in Brazil, and has met a similar challenge in its expansion to APAC and China, where wearing flip flops in public isn’t common. Moving past this is the first test before engaging more deeply with the local culture. “The challenge was to establish a flip-flop culture in China, first and foremost by making people fall in love with the Havaianas brand and what it stood for: the colorful, fun and lively Brazilian summer spirit which is core to their brand DNA,” said Brandon Tucs, Creative Director at MediaMonks.

Achieving this was a truly global effort, connecting talent from Shanghai, Los Angeles and Brazil. “Since this was the first MediaMonks job with the Havaianas, we helped them understand the positioning, the challenges going global and translating their spirit to such a different market like China,” said Caio Del Manto, Managing Director at Circus. “In the end, this is the part of the brand’s main goal: to become a global lifestyle brand that carries this easy-going spirit so famous among Brazilians.”

We established master pages for the Home and product pages, making it easy for the brand to plug in content based on brand guidelines our team had established, ensuring the digital store looks inviting in any scenario.

A writeup in Marketing Interactive noted how useful digital investment was for the brand to emerge successfully through the COVID-19 outbreak. “During COVID-19 when stores were closed in most of the APAC countries, Havaianas invested disproportionally behind digital media to maximize its brand visibility. It also set up stronger social commerce platforms and built a relevant influencer strategy with local brand ambassadors, such as Luna Maya in Indonesia or Nelydia Nik Sen in Malaysia.”

In celebration of the launch of the brand’s new shape–the Japanese-inspired Tradi Zori, signalling Havaianas’ goal to take the streets with an urban audience–the Brazil team at Circus set up a global campaign of unboxing videos from influencers in the streetwear space. These included Leo Mandella (@GullyGuyLeo), Kofi McCalla (@Icykof), Enrico Cardoso (@EnricoCardoso) and Suyane Ynaya (@Suyane_Ynaya), whose content portrays the diverse ways that the Tradi Zori enhances personal style.

From virtualized commerce and events to driving real-world, societal impact, Havaianas has used digital to move the needle in several ways around the world. By establishing partners upstream in the planning process (like Circus’ involvement with the Hana team), the brand is able to quickly pivot campaigns without losing focus of long-term goals and tasks. Through this approach, it’s no surprise that Havaianas has achieved so much success in its march to digital.

If you follow the ad industry at all, you’ve almost certainly seen article after article championing those who’ve leaned into their brand purpose amidst the pandemic. Some go as far to encourage brands to find purpose–and while purpose is certainly important, many brands that claim to be purpose-driven still miss the mark, failing to drive real, visible impact. This can easily backfire, leading to criticism of exploiting societal challenges for their own gain, like accusations of greenwashing.

“During this time, this idea of whether brands helped, how they turned up and whether they’ve done the right thing has taken hold,” says MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar. “That’s about responsibility: can you take on a role that is more meaningful than a nebulous idea of brand purpose?” That notion of responsibility is key. Brands that have made headlines in their response to COVID-19 didn’t always center their role around their purpose; instead, they’ve shown up in other ways by innovating to fill the societal cracks that the pandemic had exposed.

David Rotman, Editor-at-Large of MIT Technology Review, writes in his assessment of the overall COVID-19 response that, “We’re great at devising shiny, mainly software-driven bling that makes our lives more convenient in many ways. But we’re far less accomplished at reinventing health care, rethinking education, making food production and distribution more efficient, and, in general, turning our technical know-how loose on the largest sectors of the economy.”

His point highlights a real problem in brands’ ability to pivot resources and rapidly innovate when new problems arise. While purpose may be important for a brand to have, it’s this ability to step up and support consumers—and broader audiences—when and where it matters most that has become so critical today.

The fundamental disconnect rests between the purpose exhibited in some brands’ everyday messaging versus the way they do business, exposing a difference between brands that have only recently begun to consider a higher purpose versus those that were born from a need to change the world for the better. Ter Haar explains this pitfall succinctly: “Those brands chase after purpose but don’t have it as a real driver of the organization.”

Turning Words into Action

To identify how your brand can identify and fulfill its role, look beyond a vague or broad sense of purpose and instead focus on specific actions that make sense for the brand given its value prop or resources. We saw many brands show up this way, like AB InBev and Ford, who shifted factory production and supply chains to bottle hand sanitizer and make ventilators, respectively.

But brands don’t have to always make such heavy lifting to make impact. Headspace is a smaller brand that has done well by offering a free collection of meditations to everyone: “weathering the storm,” which is tailored specifically for the reality we’re in right now. Even more importantly, it’s offering free access to its entire library for the unemployed and for healthcare professionals. While these are simple maneuvers, they do well to deliver on Headspace’s promise to make guided meditation accessible for everyone.

Ensuring that purpose permeates every part of the organization is critical—not just messaging, but also in the purchase experience (like the “buy one, give one” model popularized by Toms Shoes) and how it treats its employees. As arbiter of the brand-customer relationship, this means CMOs must have a seat at the table to collaborate with other leaders of the organization more closely. But ter Haar notes that founder-led organizations like Airbnb, who had to lay off workers earlier this year in response to the travel industry being brought to its knees, made the best of a difficult situation by connecting laid off employees with new job opportunities.

“It was a great reflection of their marketing purpose. They managed to do it in a way that strengthened the brand,” says ter Haar. “Marketing is such a reflective part of how they position as a brand—and that’s where marking should be. If you have a strong brand perception, it’s in everything you do.”

Lay a Foundation to Build the Brand Role

For many brands, the ability to execute its role is also directly related to its digital maturity and agile capabilities. Having a strong foundation in both allows them to identify opportunities to support consumers in new ways and reallocate resources to execute those initiatives quickly.

A great example of this is the Boost with Facebook content series. Facebook has long hosted events for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and had reached out to our team in Sao Paulo to create the experiential portion of their upcoming events local to the region. When COVID-19 struck, the team had to quickly pivot the programming to a digital setting. “As their partner, we considered how we could quickly pivot to meet their audience where they were online and tailor the content for that new format,” says Carolina Brandao, Senior Film Producer at MediaMonks.

While the original purpose of the event was to train attendees in using Facebook’s marketing tools, the digital version switched gears to also include resources that could help SMBs survive and thrive through the pandemic. Programming takes the form of live panels as well as live-to-tape spots—all directed remotely—that bring together local politicians and leadership from bigger brands, offering broad insights and support to SMBs. Our team in Sao Paulo handled content for all of South America, including programming in both Spanish and Portuguese.

“This project is a perfect example of how MediaMonks was able to change, adapt and help our client create completely new solutions,” says Brandao. “One week before, we weren’t doing remote shoots or livestreams yet, but we were able to pull that off successfully.” Brandao is also proud of the tangible effect that the content has for the SMBs that rely on Facebook for marketing and connecting to consumers. “In the end, this is actually helping someone who is going through a really tough moment to get their feet on the ground and get the right resources.”

For brands that are more siloed, it can be difficult to make such a quick transition. But just like with any initiative to become more agile, a simple solution is to experiment with organizing small, multi-talented teams. By refreshing the existing structure and building urgency around fast solutions—privileging speed over perfection—your teams can rapidly prototype and build new solutions as they arise.

While purpose is important for offering a waypoint or a path for the brand to move toward, it’s this agile response that becomes critical to fulfilling its role. Once a brand is properly prepared, it is better positioned to show up and tangibly build value at speed—and directly support audiences, no matter what form that takes.

From brand role to transforming digital experiences, it’s time to (re)activate customer obsession.