Happy Friday!
Taylor Lorenz at The New York Times writes “Stop Trying to Be Productive” and that the “…internet wants you to believe you aren’t doing enough with all that “extra time” you have now. But staying inside and attending to basic needs is plenty.”
I think that’s great advice for our personal lives.
Everyone is sharing links about free online classes, workout challenges, and ways to utilize this at-home period to learn new skills. But I don’t really think everyone will come out of this knowing a new language, how to code, and having their kitchen pantries color coded and alphabetized. Maybe I'm wrong. But it is indeed okay to just cope right now on the personal side.
But for our clients and brands, we do need to start thinking about what we’re doing today and how it will affect tomorrow. In the past week we worked through Triage Communication Strategies in a Crisis, then Proactive Communications & Organic Content Strategy in a Crisis, and now we're going to talk about Rebuilding & Pivoting.
In an effort to understand where we’re at and predict where we’re going, this week I’ve been studying how companies pivoted and what innovation came out of the 2008 recession.
POST-2008 RECESSION PIVOT EXAMPLES:
- Starbucks opened up their company to customer-generated ideas and started investing more heavily in mobile technology and customer personalization. Today, mobile-standard is key to quick-service restaurants and personalization is table-stakes.
- Netflix gained 3 million members by debuting the ability to stream an unlimited amount of content per month atop the disc-delivery service and at different pricing tiers. Today, you can’t be a media company without a streaming platform option.
- Uber was founded as a response to not finding a taxi in post-recession marketplace. Today, app-based convenience culture is standard, and the “gig economy” has crossed into countless industry categories.
- Instagram and Pinterest were developed and launched as a response to consumer demand to enjoy social media through images (and not always being sold things through blog posts and links). Today, image-forward social media is still the most popular and impactful.
- Square and Venmo were created to allow people to split lunch, buy each other a beer and exchange money without involving big banks or writing a check.
- Groupon was invented to allow consumers to get a deal and small businesses to pre-sell inventory or service slots to drive immediate revenue. Today, consumer companies are pushing gift cards as a way to maintain revenue, and consumers are looking for ways to still have fun and experiences without breaking the bank. And with social undergirding all interaction at the moment, it's Groupon's moment to shine again
These companies embraced bad circumstances and used them to solve both old and new problems based on changing consumer culture, needs and habits.
Just studying these 8 companies then and now can give you ample insights into small shifts you can apply to your brands today. No, they don't line up exactly with your problem. But there's a lot to learn from small pivots that can apply to our brands as we think about similarities in the last recession and the coming one.
Top-line lessons for us:
- Embrace creative challenges
- Factor in shifts in consumer habits, spending, and connectivity
- Listen to your customers and involve them in solutions
- Explore tiered pricing
- Freemiums work
- Make small bets
- Pilot and pivot
JOBS AND HIRING AMIDST COVID-19
On the job front, it’s still early in this crisis, but there are already talented peers in our industry who need work to cover their bills and have lots of talent to offer.
There are two key places I’m tracking that have jobs posted — The One Club’s list and David Chouinard’s list at Candor of companies who are still hiring versus those who are frozen. And in Minnesota,
If you know someone looking for a job right now, be sure to make time to chat with them and help them out. We need to stick together, and there are so many smart people in our communities who deserve all the support we can offer.
QUARTERLY 🎶 PLAYLIST
Every quarter I keep a Spotify playlist of the songs I'm playing on repeat. It's like an aural time capsule of sorts. It's a new quarter this week, so here's Q1 2020: SWAN WRAPPED – Q1 PLAYLIST
See you on the internet!
Greg
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