Published: March 20th, 2020
With the coronavirus, we seem to be entering unchartered waters. Over the past few years, various shocks to the system – from the 2008 financial crash, to Brexit, to Trump – seem to have washed away the old certainties. The coronavirus is the largest shock to the system yet – a global event that threatens the lives and livelihoods of millions, as well as obliterating our basic certainties (such as belief in Western societies’ invulnerability to pandemics).
In such circumstances, how can companies plan for anything? Any strategy assumes that events are, to some extent, controllable. However, the experience of the present seems to teach us that little can be planned for, and the best to be hoped for is to react to shocks quickly and effectively.
I would agree that planning today is highly challenging, but I think there are 3 basic ways that companies can reassert some control over their destinies.
1. Challenge our mental models about the future
The zeitgeist across culture seems to be that the future is basically uncontrollable and unpredictable. The globalised 21st century world is simply too complex, too dynamic, to be grasped in the present, let alone in the future – at least with our limited human intellects.
Whilst partially true, this argument is exaggerated. The emergence of the coronavirus seems to have surprised few in the scientific community, even if none would have claimed to have predicted the exact time and place of its arrival. Other recent shocks have been, to a greater or lesser extent, predictable.
The reason why we exaggerate the unpredictability of events is cultural. As an insightful Buzzfeedarticle proclaims, “the 2010s broke our sense of time.” In the age of the smartphone, we live in an eternal present that throws us one way and then another, constantly disorienting us in an experience that is as exhilarating as it is frightening.
Today, we lack a clear sense of the past and future. We don’t believe in grand future utopias, as people in the 20th century did. Regarding the past, we are highly nostalgic, but we are nostalgic for places that never existed. For example, recent nostalgic Netflix dramas like The End of the F****** World take place in an imaginary 1980s that is both British and American.
The problem with seeing events only in the terms of the present is everything seems unprecedented and out of control. We lack the ability to see their precedents and the forces that caused them. Since we can’t see where have been, we also can’t see where we are going.
There are similar problems in the world of strategy. The 20th century philosophy of strategy – embodied by theories like Michael Porter’s “five forces” – was stable, sensible growth based on predictable futures. In the 21st century, however, the emphasis has shifted to emphasise dynamism and unpredictability. We see this in theories of disruptive innovation and complexity.
As useful as these theories may be in certain respects, they also encourage brands to see themselves as locked in an eternal present in which categories evolve unpredictability and in which upstart brands may displace them at any minute.
However, in most categories, even those that have been disrupted, value creation evolves over the long-term, not the short-term. The story of food over the last few decades has been coming to terms with a damaging industrial food system, and the realignment of product benefits to serve the needs of “always-on” productivity culture.
The story of luxury has been coming to terms with old meanings of status, based on gilded objects and social class. Brands have innovated through focusing on meaningful experiences like luxury nature retreats, or by ironically celebrating excess (Gucci or maximalism).
Putting brands and categories into a model of the past, present and future helps us to see things in context, revealing the longer-term trends shaping them. In turn, this should deliver a sense of control – even when global events introduce continual unpredictability.
2. Embrace new methods
Most conventional insights methods offer rich descriptions of the present, but are less useful for showing how categories, brands and people evolve over time. On the other hand, a less conventional method like strategic foresight may offer rich insight into the far future, but may be less useful for addressing the near-future – the time horizon that many companies will be especially interested in right now.
Semiotics seems to represent the “sweet spot” between these two extremes. One of the techniques of commercial semiotics, “Residual, Dominant and Emergent (RDE) code mapping” seems ideally suited to the task.
RDE maps categories or relevant themes (e.g. “masculinity”, “mobility”) as they evolve over time, but using only cultural phenomena that exist today. It is therefore not speculative in the way that foresights is.
The idea is that consumer culture consists of old values and meanings that will eventually become irrelevant (residual), those that are mainstream today (dominant), and those on the far-edge (emergent), which are often driven by leading brands and consumers, that will eventually become mainstream.
Semiotics seems ideally suited to helping brands navigate the emerging realities that coronavirus is creating.
3. Shape new realities
Coronavirus is already creating a “new normal”, but it is not yet clear what it will mean for brands. However, it’s likely that one shift we will see is a shift in values from “hyper-individualism” to “interdependence”.
In the post-war period, when mass consumer culture began, brands valued the nuclear family. From the 1980s, the individual became king – and brands became ways to express your authentic self and to achieve your individual ambitions.
However, in the age of coronavirus, it’s clear that a hyper-individualist ethos isn’t enough. An effective response can’t be offered by individuals acting alone. It can only be offered by individuals acting as part of a wider whole (a community or society).
The shift to interdependence predates the coronavirus. For instance, brands associated with sustainability have for a number of years emphasised the link between the individual person and the community and ecosystem they are a part of. However, expect to see an acceleration of this shift in the future.
I’d recommend that brands ask themselves how they can shape the new world of interdependence – and lead the change to a new, more effective and more inclusive culture.