How To Create Your Brand’s Recovery as the U.S. Begins To Reopen
As leaders, our key challenge is to make decisions, first strategically, and then operationally. For the past few months, we have been making operational decisions as a reaction to the crisis we all are forced to confront. With most of those decisions made, we now turn to our primary job of guiding organizations into the future. Peter Drucker famously said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” How do we create a future with so much uncertainty about it? To make strategic choices we must rely on experience drawn from history.
How do we understand a global GDP contraction in excess of 3% and double that in the U.S.? How do we evaluate the economic impact in the U.S. of a loss of more than 33 million jobs in under two months? What will the government’s combined monetary and fiscal stimulus do in these circumstances? There is nothing in history, from the Great Depression to the Spanish Flu, to guide us.
Maybe we’re looking in the wrong places. I grew up on a farm in Northern Montana. Farming there is most affected by something we can’t control at all: the weather. We couldn’t predict the weather very well and we certainly couldn’t influence it, so we used a lot of common sense and that served us pretty well. We can’t predict the path this pandemic will take, although we can influence its path better than we can the weather. If we break down some of the fundamental issues it represents to consumers and the economy into component parts, perhaps we can see enough of what the future will look like to create our future.
On a consumer level, we are dealing with two related tendencies: 1) consumers’ willingness to get back to their normal lives, and 2) their financial ability to do so. Consumer willingness in this crisis is simply a function of personal safety. We are social creatures; we want to socialize. Therefore, having some type of informed confidence that we can do so safely is key. This means testing processes that work. Until we have them in place on a widespread scale, consumer willingness will be inconsistent, higher in areas with low confirmed case concerns, and lower in areas with high confirmed case concerns. Therefore, the first indication of a sustained national recovery is a testing program that consumers have confidence in. That appears to be at least a few months from now, and most likely in the fall for many parts of the country.
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