Waving, not drowning: Business in the post-Covid era
The day New Zealand’s four-week (but really six) mandatory lockdown was announced, I could feel the panic spreading through New Zealand businesses like a drop of ink in water.
Interaction after interaction fanned ripples of fear across the industry. Every customer services representative was concerned for their job and their family. Every customer was running out of patience.
Nobody had a clear idea what was going on or what they should do, and nothing about the business of commerce really seemed important anymore.
An interaction with a retailer that’s normally one of my favourites really drove it home. I’d previously ordered several punnets of winter vegetable seedlings online and, when they arrived a day or two before lockdown, some spinach was missing from the box.
The staffer who answered my call was clearly struggling. I asked about the order and he replied, “Oh, your spinach.” There was a long pause. Thoughts of orders, customer inquiries and spinach seedlings battled with matters of survival and personal safety in his brain. Survival and personal safety won.
“You know, we’re actually not operating today,” he said, and hung up the phone.
If the world is falling down around you, who cares about your NPS?
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Nearly five weeks into lockdown, that initial surge of fear has mostly melted away. For some consumers, it’s been replaced by impatience and rattiness. They’re upset about queueing; these vegetables are priced higher than they used to be; and why isn’t flour stocked yet?
This griping is anxiety in another form, and entirely understandable - many shoppers are under financial stress, and they’ve been placed in a position where they’re forced to blindly trust just a handful of retailers with all their needs. This is a big leap from a globalised economy where the shopper had all the power and almost infinite choice.
Adaption and grace in the face of rapid change are now a part of the New Zealand business community’s everyday lives in a way that they weren’t truly before.
We all talked a big game about being change-ready, but not even my grandparents have experienced living through an environment in which everywhere except Greenland is changing so rapidly and so completely.
Like many people in the post-Covid economy, these changes have forced me to make career choices which are outside my comfort zone. My five-year stint as a business magazine editor is now behind me, and I’m expanding my existing side hustle as a B2B content marketing specialist. The streets are quiet outside my house, but inside, it’s a hive of activity.
The one hurdle I keep butting up against is my continually frustrated desire to make long-term plans. In so many conversations lately, friends and colleagues and I have discussed our attempts to strategise our way out of this mess, only to acknowledge that making long-term plans depends on making assumptions that nobody, anywhere, can confirm or deny.
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Now that we’ve entered Level 3, the challenge for businesses as we move out of lockdown will be: A) The impossibility of making solid long-term plans in an environment where Covid-19 is still a factor, and B) Finding a way to shift both staff and shoppers out of ‘survival and personal safety’ mode, and back to a frame of mind that’s interested in non-essential matters such as shopping.
The winner in New Zealand’s post-Covid economy will not necessarily be the brands with the widest reach, but those with the strongest ability to rally a community around themselves.
Consumers will need to be reassured, treated with empathy, and offered goods and services that reward their newly-heightened attention. This is the big shift that the ‘mindful shopping’ advocates have been waiting for.
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My spinach never did arrive, but the kale and rocket seedlings I bought at the same time are thriving. My partner and I find ourselves eagerly checking the garden each day, noticing growth and patterns that we never did before. It seems easier to concentrate on smaller things than it used to be.
Like most people, we’re waiting out the last few weeks of lockdown with calmness and anticipation. New Zealand is collectively breathing in. Soon, we’ll hopefully all breathe out again.
Sarah Dunn is a B2B content marketing specialist and former award-winning magazine editor. If you’d like help telling your business’s story, you can find her at https://www.sarahdunn.co. Cite ‘Waving not drowning’ for 5 percent off your first project.