Over a recent weekend, one of my friends bought and installed a new TV from Best Buy. He isn’t worried about social contact, but for convenience’s sake used their Contactless Curbside Pickup. In less than five minutes, he pulled up in front of the store, never got out of his car, and relaxed while two guys loaded the TV and three other items into his car.
It’s an example of a “pandemic” innovation that’s worth keeping, one that combines the best of online and local shopping.
Does your business have its own list of the best of new and old capabilities that you wish to leverage moving forward? Even more importantly, are you trying to anticipate not-yet-fully-visible consequences of changes that are coming thanks to what happened in the past year?
What do I mean by consequences? Here’s a partial list:
● Inflation is once again raising its head. “We are seeing very substantial inflation,” Warren Buffett said at his annual shareholder meeting Saturday. “We are raising prices. People are raising prices to us and it’s being accepted.”
● Supply chains continue to be disrupted.
● Digital innovation moved extremely quickly in the past year, advancing customer expectations dramatically.
● There is widespread anticipation that we are poised to kick off the next incarnation of the Roaring Twenties. People are getting on planes again and there aren’t nearly enough rental cars in the United States to handle them when they land
● And yet… we still aren’t out of the pandemic in the United States, and it’s out of control in some other parts of the world.
You might argue that as a society, we don’t know where we are going, but we sure are headed there fast.
In every business—including mine—there is more uncertainty than normal regarding what comes next. Expectations have changed, as have habits. We have all had to make adjustments, and no one knows for sure which of those adjustments will survive long-term and which will fade away.
So, on one hand, you might argue that it makes sense to wait and see how events and expectations transpire. But that almost certainly won’t work.
Few people remember that face masks sold out in January 2020, not two months later in March when everything locked down. Those of us who wait too long will find ourselves far behind the marketplace. We have to take educated guesses now regarding what our “different normal” will look like, and how our capabilities and services must start shifting now to accommodate that new reality.