Work reimagined: How brands win in the hybrid work era

The post pandemic return to office push collided with a permanent rise in flexible schedules, and the result is a new marketing reality. Hybrid work is now the operating system for millions of people who split their week between home and office.

For brand marketers, consumer insights professionals, and retail strategists, the stakes are high. You need to know not only who your customer is, but where they will be on Tuesday versus Friday, and how that shift alters what they notice, need, and buy.

I have seen the dynamics up close. During three years at WeWork, I watched workplace norms change in real time as teams toggled between collaboration days and quiet work at home. Those routine changes cascaded into everything from coffee and lunch runs to where people test new products.

Hybrid and remote work have rewired the daily clock, and with it, how people interact with brands. Read on to discover the implications for your brand and how to adapt to reach consumers in our new hybrid work world.

The big picture: Hybrid is sticky, RTO is uneven

What the latest data says

After an early pandemic surge and a partial pullback, work from home has stabilized globally. The Global Survey of Working Arrangements finds that average work from home days plateaued after 2022 and remains roughly one day per week on average worldwide among college-educated employees, with large variation by country.

Office attendance continues to recover, but not to 2019 norms, and the pattern is lumpy by market and weekday. Data shows office visits rose in 2024 and into 2025, with April 2025 among the three busiest in-office months since the pandemic. At the same time, many markets still sit well below pre-pandemic baselines.

For workers who split their time between the office and home, new patterns have emerged. One resource highlights consistently higher office attendance on Tuesdays and lower on Fridays, a rhythm that makes planning by daypart and by day of the week essential.

Local markets are diverging. New York City has been an RTO leader, while San Francisco posted the strongest year over year office traffic growth in 2025 even though it remains below 2019 levels. These microtrends matter for targeting and merchandising.

Why the pattern matters to marketers, and how Suzy can help

What this means: Hybrid schedules fragment attention across settings, devices, and commutes. People see different prompts and face different frictions at home versus in the office. Brands that map communications, promotions, and distribution to this split-week cadence will outperform those that treat the week as a blur.

Suzy Signals gives marketers a data-driven edge by surfacing emerging patterns in how hybrid and return-to-office trends shape consumer behavior. Paired with agile research on Suzy, these insights help brands stay ahead of shifts and design strategies that resonate across both home and office contexts.

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How hybrid work reshapes when and where people buy

The new dayparts: coffee and lunch

Consumer dayparts have shifted in ways that echo hybrid routines. Coffee chains saw increased visits in early 2024, with continued expansion of drive-thru formats that fit flexible commutes and errand loops.

Fast casual and QSR are adapting to weekday peaks. Analysis shows concepts geared to speed and takeout pull larger weekday and midday crowds.

Remote work shopping habits vs office-day habits

At home, shoppers batch errands, lean on delivery, and browse in micro-moments between tasks. Online prices have been deflating across many categories, which encourages digital deal hunting. Adobe’s Digital Price Index shows online prices fell year over year for 34 consecutive months through June 2025, even as total online spend around major events remains strong.

What this means: In office districts, impulse, convenience, and experiential categories rebound on high-attendance days. Cities with stronger finance and professional services bases are recovering faster, which supports premium coffee, fast casual, and after-work social occasions midweek.

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Consumer flexibility expectations are now table stakes

Convenience-driven marketing is the default

Click-and-collect, curbside, and rapid local delivery are not pandemic-era quirks. They are baseline expectations in a hybrid world. Forecasts point to sustained Buy Online Pickup In-Store (BOPIS) growth in the United States through the decade, with analysts projecting strong double-digit growth rates from 2025 onward, driven by omnichannel integration and consumer demand for time-saving options.

What this means: Retail chains are leaning into omnichannel visibility to reduce friction. Digital Commerce 360 highlights growing adoption of features like in-store stock status that help shoppers plan errands around office days and home days.

Omnichannel brand engagement is shifting discovery

Discovery is also moving. Salesforce’s Connected Shoppers report finds that about four in ten consumers already use AI to discover products, with adoption highest among Gen Z. That behavior blends with social commerce and creator content across the week.

What this means: For marketers, blend channels intentionally. Use office-day messaging that fits fast decisions near transit and elevators, and home-day messaging that supports deeper research, reviews, and longer-form content.

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Value is the macro theme, even as routines normalize

Price sensitivity remains elevated. Mid 2025 saw widespread value moves across big-box retailers and quick service restaurants, from price points to bundles, in response to economic uncertainty and tariffs. Marketers should expect shoppers to trade between brands and channels to optimize perceived value.

Ecommerce growth has cooled from pandemic highs, which makes profitable growth and conversion fundamentals more important than chasing volume at any cost.

What this means: blend value with convenience. Anchor midweek promos to office attendance, make pickup and returns effortless, and use first party data to prevent margin-eroding blanket discounts by targeting offers to the right day (in-office is typically Tuesday-Thursday, and work-from-home is usually Mondays and Fridays) and the right mission.

Suzy helps marketers validate these tactics by quickly testing concepts, promotions, and timing with real consumers, ensuring strategies align with shifting routines and deliver measurable impact.

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Strategy shift: from channel planning to blended marketing strategies

Map the split-week journey

Think in two default modes: in-office days and at-home days. Then plan media, promotions, and product availability for each.

In-office days (often Tuesday–Thursday): Prioritize near-office out of home, employer partnerships, transit and rideshare placements, and lunchtime mobile offers that convert with fast pickup. Coordinate sampling or pop-ups in lobbies on high-occupancy days.
At-home days (often Monday and Friday): Lean into longer consideration content, replenishment reminders, BOPIS or curbside pickup for afternoon errands, and subscription nudges. Keep delivery fees and arrival times transparent to protect conversion.

Design for micro-occasions

Use daypart segmentation that mirrors hybrid routines:

Early morning: coffee, breakfast, and wellness routines that change with commute days. Coffee category growth and drive-thru expansion reflect this demand.
Midday: shorter, snackable formats and heat-and-eat at home that replace sit-down lunches on remote days.
Late afternoon: quick errands near the office or school, which favor BOPIS and curbside pickup.

Build flexible retail media and creative

Create modular creative that can be versioned by day of week and location density. For example, rotate copy and offers between a downtown geofence and a suburban one, anchored to known high-occupancy days in that city.

Suzy helps bring this to life by enabling rapid, location-specific creative testing through monadic surveys. Teams can also leverage Suzy Speaks for qualitative depth to optimize messaging and offers by geos and consumer behaviors in real time.

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Product, pricing, and promotions for a hybrid lifestyle

Rethink your pack sizes and formats

Smaller, portable formats and microwavable or ready-to-serve options fit lunchtime at home and office snacking. As hybrid work schedules blur the lines between home kitchens and workplace pantries, consumers are seeking versatile meals and snacks that travel easily and adapt to both environments.

Engineer value without eroding brand

With online prices softening in many categories, pair value architecture with clear quality cues. Maintain good, better, best tiers, use limited-time bundles to protect Average Unit Retail (AUR), and deploy loyalty currency on days that align with local office peaks to win trips without permanent price cuts.

Make fulfillment a loyalty engine

Invest in order visibility, accurate pickup times, and painless returns. Retailers’ increasing transparency on in-store stock status are reducing friction for hybrid shoppers who plan around commute windows.

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Measurement that matches reality

Instrument the week, not just the month

Aggregate metrics can hide hybrid effects. Track KPIs by city and by weekday. Compare office-dense zip codes to residential ones, then adjust media and promotions accordingly.

Capture real consumer language in the moment

Suzy’s AI-driven insights platform helps brands uncover consumer sentiment in real time, and Suzy Speaks pairs voice-driven, AI-moderated conversations with quant scale so teams can hear what hybrid consumers actually say about convenience, timing, and value.

Use these tools to test hypotheses such as:

Do your office-day shoppers prefer mobile order ahead with shelf pickup or staff handoff?
Which offer framing works best on home days: free delivery threshold or pickup time-slot guarantees?
How do messaging and price perception change across Tuesday versus Friday?

Close the loop with rapid experiments

Pair quick-turn concept tests on Suzy with live market pilots. For instance, test two versions of a midweek lunch bundle in three downtown stores while running a contrasting “Friday at home” family pack online. Then use follow-up Suzy Speaks interviews to capture the why behind the results.

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Pitfalls to avoid

Treating national averages as local truths

RTO looks different in Miami than in San Francisco, and even within a city by neighborhood and industry mix. Anchor plans in local data. Cross-check with office traffic benchmarks and transit trends before rolling out national daypart strategies.

Ignoring capacity strain

If your audience is already over-scheduled, long explainer emails or multi-step promos will underperform. Short, skimmable creative with clear calls to action respects hybrid attention patterns,

Over-discounting when value can be designed

Shoppers respond to convenience and certainty, not just lower prices. Balance promotions with fulfillment promises, clear pickup windows, and accurate inventory visibility.

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How Suzy helps you win the hybrid week

Suzy’s end-to-end insights platform lets you test messaging, offers, and pack sizes by day of week and by market. You can field rapid quant to size the opportunity, then use Suzy Speaks to capture real voice responses at scale, revealing the emotions, obstacles, and tradeoffs behind choices in a hybrid routine.

Suzy’s insights library also spotlights how AI is reshaping consumer trust and purchase paths, which intersects directly with hybrid shopping journeys and omnichannel choices.

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Connecting with consumers in a hybrid work world

The return to office movement did not erase remote work. It created a durable split-week reality where context changes fast. Hybrid work consumer behavior means your customer is a different shopper on Tuesday than on Friday.

The brands that thrive will align convenience, flexibility, and value to those shifting contexts, instrument the week with the right metrics, and keep listening to real people in real time.

For marketers, insights leaders, and retail strategists, the payoff is practical. During my years at WeWork, I watched how small routine shifts produced big downstream effects on what people buy and when. Today, that same hybrid routine can be a growth engine if you build blended marketing strategies, omnichannel brand engagement, and convenience-driven experiences around it.

Suzy can help you measure, learn, and adapt at the speed of the modern workweek. Want to see what real time research looks like in action?

Book a demo or explore Suzy Speaks today.

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