After the Black Swan. The power of the unexpected.
Marketing lives in the unexpected, companies have to deal with it.
Many have been the things we (re)discovered that during these months of a mandatory slowdown of our life rhythms hit even the busiest companies. However, the sudden pandemic and its well-known consequences also forced us to rethink a fundamental — although largely ignored — concept in the market and in the global economics: the Block Swan.
A vivid metaphor Nassim Taleb came up with in 2007, the Black Swan is a sudden, random event, a twist used to represent his theory on uncertainty.
This is what 1,500 entrepreneurs interviewed by Goldman Sachs realised when they noticed how, in circumstances affected by the Covid-19 lockdown, their businesses had less than three months of life — basically, just a quarter of autonomy.
All these companies, although with diverse nature, location and history, experienced firsthand how helpless they can be in front of an unforeseen event turning the tables and altering their business model.
Let’s just think of a leader company, which had an unstoppable growth in the last years and marketing-oriented from the very beginning: AirBnB. It was not the months of lockdown that weakened the company. Rather, it was the deficit of its natural target customer (national and international tourists) when these were forced home. Even now, travels are restricted to shorter periods and cheaper interregional travels are preferred.
The remaining wake in the water
After the swan arrival — or contextually to it — companies and people had to come to terms with the necessity of a health check on their businesses and on the market they are in.
Indeed, if people realised to live in small flats, without a garden, to work far from their homes, to never spend enough time with their families, companies realised how inefficient their offices, how short-sighted their forecasts and how affected by fear their strategic choices were.
How many of these considerations, which lasted for months, will we forget?
I think working from home is a clear example, especially in markets still not fully digitalised. Although the statistics show companies increasingly interested in this formula, the real number of adoption is way lower.
Working from home has always been a scary solution. Companies don’t want to lose control of their employees, while these need to be in touch with the company and its environment. It is only the emergency that forces both sides to jump into the formula. And so, we witnessed a surge in people working from home in the UK, from 5% in 2019 to roughly 45% in April 2020.
We needed a Black Swan, unfortunately a pandemic, to shuffle the cards in the employment deck. Both sides had proof that, sure, future is hard to foresee, but a company has many resources to deploy and that strategy and organisation make everything work, even remotely.
Are we finally starting over?
William Gibson said “Future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed”.
The considerations we made in this period helped us find new solid foundations, from where we should start over. More structured companies made the best use of their time to innovate even before the emergency period. That is, they went on exploring new lands where to test new strategies.
Let’s take again the case of Airbnb. Right in the middle of the lockdown, it blocked its platform, had consistent communication with its users and employed its strategic marketing team to test new features and business models: online experiences, long-term rents, rent-free living to hospital personnel, are just a few examples.
If there’s one thing that the black swan must have taught us is that we cannot ease down again, thinking that everything’s going back to normal. The main characteristic of a Black Swan is its unpredictability. It can come back unexpectedly and under new disguises.
Taming the Unexpected
Needs change. And perhaps, at this moment, new ones are born. Let’s remember that companies live off needs to identify and satisfy.
This is the ideal moment to be pioneers, to innovate the company brand, to strengthen the marketing operations — or to make use of experts in the field — with the ultimate goal to test potential changes, even if against the flow (let’s not forget Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses!”).
Many companies, during the worst time of the lockdown, discovered the power of the digital world, an asset these won’t lose on the way. Here is a fundamental answer to the unexpected. To widen one’s point of view, redesigning competencies and offering with what the market’s presenting.
“… Necessity reawakens dreams and desires to escape difficult situations” Fulvio Montipò, interviewed by Forbes.
A second answer, instead, concerns experimentation. In finance, a rule of thumb is to fight the unexpected with diversification. Companies should adopt the same strategies, knowing however that the best strategies (marketing, communication, etc.) shouldn’t necessarily be those widely accepted. Rather, they should be positively responsive to an initial, structured, and specific analysis of each case.
Marketing as a Tool
But how do you diversify and test in the right way? What is the limit that divides diversification — of activities/strategies — from the waste of money?
My opinion is that it partly depends on the individuals’ strength of will (there’s companies that aim for the stars or nothing!) and partly on the adoption of a clear methodology.
For those who support companies in their road to market and ideal targets, it must be a scientific methodology:
Its foundations are:
- True basic knowledge of the field and of the available tools;
- An innate inclination to constant and prolonged tests (frustrating fro both the marketer and the customer) of activities, tools, texts, images, etc.;
- An inclination to the analysis of results and data.
These are the bases where marketers with not only a strong passion for their job, but also for data, move and operate on. They are fundamental to differentiate yourself in a dynamic market where every previous instance gets overcome in no time.
We shouldn’t underestimate the power of mistakes and failures. They are the basics to distinguish who dares from who simply follows the trails of others. It is not a case that it is the US to hold the record of business/product failures (a coincidence?).
Trend Analysis
By taming the unexpected we can analyse the (very near) future trends.
Companies that decided to remain open, particularly leaders in their sectors, are generally those that kept being close to their customers or that moved in advance with their intuition and/or methods to foresee the newly born market demands.
The odds, as of now, seem to be in favour of those inclined to risk it: those who knew how to innovate to build a new concept of affinity to the market — actually, to people! — that knew how to listen to the ongoing trends and understood the market’s necessities. Unsettled necessities, which only who dares risking can transform in the next “Ford”.
BE FOOLISH.
