How to re-engage with the changed customers

The coronavirus shock has disrupted more than jobs, supply chains, and financial markets. Your customer has changed fundamentally, too.

The number one task for many companies now is discovering where their B2C and B2B customers have moved to and re-engaging with them.

COVID-19 is a different beast than recent economic crises and recessions such as the Great Recession of 2008 and the Mideast oil crisis, whose causes were financially driven. The fundamental driver of the pandemic is health and safety concerns and hence customer driven. Customers’ immobility and desire to be safe in the current environment has resulted in volatility in purchases and productivity across idiosyncratic product categories, resulting in a net economic crisis of a type that has not been witnessed by anyone alive today.

Government-imposed quarantines, self-isolation, and closures of stores and offices have further forced changes to customers and hence firm-based behaviors. The outcome of customers’ health and fears has resulted not in a traditional recession but a “deaccession,” where supply and demand exist, but customer-access to products and services has been significantly shut off.

All in all, this set of circumstances and stricter budget constraints make customers less able and less willing to spend compared to past recessions. How will you find them? How will you engage them?

What is clear in the COVID-deaccession is that this change in customer behavior is pushing firms into a new “directional reality.” Firms need to adapt to shifting customer wants by engaging a more customer-centric philosophy. Rather than expecting their customers to come to them, they need to go to their customers.

Past research demonstrates that firms who maintain or accelerate customer-centric philosophies consistently outperform firms that do not. In fact, they gain market share from competitors who cut back on customer-centric investments.

During this COVID-deaccession, it is even more critical for firms to become more customer centric by researching and understanding their customers’ new problems caused by fear, isolation, physical distancing, and financial constraints, and attempt to structure their offerings to meet these new unmet wants and needs.

The velocity or rate of adaption that firms need to adjust to a new directional reality will depend on customer demand. Industries with decreasing customer demand—offline entertainment, hospitality, real estate, industrial commodities, and suppliers to these industries—need to adjust rapidly to give them a better chance of surviving.

In contrast, industries with increasing customer demand—grocery stores, online entertainment, teleconference providers, and their suppliers—need to adjust to this directional reality at a slower, yet definitely needed, pace to help sustain growth for the longer term.

Whether industries are experiencing decreases or increases in demand, all firms and organizations need to take a step back or forward and ask themselves: What should be my minimally viable strategy to get through these unprecedented times?

To adapt to a new customer-centric directional reality, Rohit Deshpandé from Harvard proposes an alternative to Ansoff's (1965) growth strategy matrix (see table below). The proposed 2 x 2 matrix is categorized by whether the firm is competing with existing versus new or modified products and services, and whether it is competing in current or new markets (i.e., new customers and/or new geographies).