Abstract
COVID-19 pandemic brought radical changes to all domains of activity. Disruptive changes posed challenges and offered opportunities for organisations. Human resources have seen dramatic changes around distance working, flexible working as well as large-scale redundancies. Similarly, marketing witnessed serious impacts regarding marketing channels, marketing communications, branding and brand loyalty. We conducted 12 expert interviews with marketing leaders and leading marketing scholars in the early stages of the pandemic, in the Summer of 2020. Qualitative semi-structured interviews focused on a few key areas and each interview lasted about 35 minutes, video-recorded and transcribed. Our analysis shows that the expectations in the early days of the pandemic were seismic change across business functions. It was evident that digital transformation has been accelerated and competitive technological advantages have been highlighted. These predictions and reflections have now seen largely aligned with post-pandemic literature on the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on marketing.