Accepting The Changes COVID-19 Brings to Business
Consumer changes are afoot – in a recent article posted by Ernst and Young, we can see the emergance of new consumer profiles and spending patterns. To think that this will not impact your industry, is in my opinion, planning to fail. COVID-19 is, unfortunately, going to affect every industry there is. Theo Paphitis himself went on record to say "Retail will never, ever be the same again." These changes cannot simply be taken at very surface level, we must embrace the fact that there will be changes that fundamentally affect and require our businesses to adapt to them in alignment and process.
What Matters To Our Customers?
Market segmentation and alignment is intrinsic to the success of any business. Those that do it well, understand their customer segmentation and align their value proposition to each segment effectively. This makes buying from such businesses easy because they are meeting our demands clearly. Good businesses either stumble upon this segmentation and alignment through chance or make an engaged and meaningful approach to deliver their value proposition in such a way.
COVID-19 however, is likely to change what our customers buying behaviours are. I touched on this lightly in a post aimed primarily at smaller businesses. In this post I discussed how existing qualifiers and differentiators had changed through COVID-19. Now more than ever it is important to understand these buying decisions by segment and align closely to them.
Finding out a customer’s buying profiles always seems to baffle businesses. If you want to know what your customers want, it really is as simple as just asking them. Believe it or not, most of the time they will respond with a very truthful answer.
Adapt Your Business Post COVID-19…
Adapting a business model, or go to market strategy for a segment may seem like a daunting task. There is of course, a proven process to business process redesign. After all, it in itself is simply another business process. What businesses are generally lacking is the knowledge or rationale to execute it. COVID-19 and its ramifications may just be the reason to put that project into place. Ensuring that your processes take into account the new set of buying decisions and segment requirements.
For more information, and a video explaining customer semgentation, you can view the full post – Business Planning: Failing to Plan For Post COVID-19 Norms, Is Planning To Fail
