You’ve all received emails about what businesses are doing to protect their teams, their customers, and the country at large from Covid-19. Naturally we are taking all sensible precautions as well, and we’d encourage you to do the same.

But we thought this crisis is also an opportunity to think about the future. What happens after COVID-19?

Because, make no bones about it, the world will be a different place. Often the changes we see are gradual, until a tipping point is reached, and then they change all at once. Uber wasn’t a thing, until it suddenly was. Netflix was a novelty, until it was ubiquitous.

But I think it is clear that the world will be a different place, even after a vaccine, or we reach herd immunity through mass infection.

Just a few data points, and thoughts:

– Air New Zealand is cutting 85% of its international capacity and 30% of its domestic capacity. Will the way we travel, particularly internationally, change long term?

– Sky TV, facing the wholesale cancellation of sports events, has lost 10% of its value (the market thinks that when we’re self-isolating, we’ll be watching Netflix instead).

– The streets are emptier as people work from home. Will popular business meeting spots suffer long term?

– In the UK, Ocado, the world’s largest online supermarket, is turning away new customers – they don’t even have the capacity to take orders (at the time of writing, there was a 15 minute wait to see the website). That doesn’t bode well for scalability.

Now, I understand that many businesses are in crisis mode, figuring out how the changes over the past couple of weeks, and particularly the weekend, are going to impact their business.

But if you have the space to think, now would be a great time to think about your response. At times of crisis, innovation occurs.

Simon Sinek, author of “Start With Why” says:

Innovation is not born from the dream; innovation is born from the struggle.

How will your customers be different in 6-12 months time? What do you need to do differently?

If you’d like to have a chat with us about how we can help, drop me a line.

We are totally focused on solving current and future customer problems, and now is the perfect time to think about the future.