Right now, we are all hacking new ways to live and work. We are sharpening our sensitivities to immediate response mode, listening better than ever and witnessing global behavior changes at a rate never experienced before. Emojis for handwashing and mask wearing have emerged. Your favorite entertainment and news shows are now video conferences.
It’s possible that the speed at which companies can listen, learn, and act will become forces of competitive advantage. There are several behavioral changes that businesses and organizations must be keenly aware to maintain market leadership:
1. Virtual Everything
Get on this train. Anything that can be done virtually will be. It’s happening right now from email to video conferences and events, texting to Instagram and Facebook direct messages to voice messages/calls and Marco Polo app communications. The brave and pioneering who are willing to discover and explore all creative opportunities will win and reach success first. On the other side of the coin, the desire for real experiences and freedom will explode when constraints are removed.
2. Target “Home”
This is everyone’s new center. How can your business or organization make people’s personal comfort, safety, social activities and entertainment more valuable? There will be a rise in home spending, more focus on staying local, caring for one’s community and multi-generational relationships will grow due to close quarter living. Anyone making this cocooning trend easier and more pleasant will win. Many businesses have jumped on this. For example, Smith & Noble, a custom window treatment company, offers video appointments with a designer, free samples by mail and virtual help with your home design vision.
3. Health Awareness
Health consciousness is number one on everyone’s minds. Businesses will need to incorporate new standards into their ecosystems to satisfy the pandemic consumer. Hand sanitizer, cleaner touchpoints and the display of what your health practices are will be key as to whether the public wishes to interact with your business or not. A local grocery chain experienced increased foot traffic because they advertised the extreme hygiene regime they were enforcing and placed a greeter at the door to explain their practices to shoppers, so they’d feel safer and more comfortable.
4. Cost of Trust
Trust will become more important than before. The public’s loss of confidence in the future, work, civic systems, and food/product/service supply chain availability has eroded considerably. Qualified confidence-building, faith and positivity are key now. You want to make sure you are acknowledging circumstances and delivering authentic messaging of hope, help, concern and solutions. Our current situation will undeniably change what we consider to be premium products and services based on new needs.
It is possible for business to flourish if you are taking into account what next steps and strategies will be necessary to address the world’s most current human behavioral changes. Once you do, create an internal business plan and external marketing plan that will answer these needs and guide your organization to greater success.
About:
Los Angeles based Sagon-Phior, a full service marketing and branding agency, utilizing emotional branding to build better relationships between a brand and an audience. Emotional branding enables more effective ways to increase brand awareness, loyalty and sales while revealing insights to better understand important, often unseen, patterns of consumer behavior.
Sagon-Phior has successfully applied this unique practice to many national and global brands in technology, healthcare, banking and lifestyle industries. For more information, go to Sagon-Phior.com
