Volume 24: Ordering takeout? Use Help Main Street.

1. Please don’t reward pandemic profiteers.

Tl;dr: Help Main Street steps in to disrupt the parasites of restaurant delivery.

Restaurants run on razor-thin margins at the best of times, so it’s clearly and manifestly wrong for a restaurant to receive only 1/3 of its total order value while GrubHub takes the rest.

An unfortunate reality of much of what has been labeled “disruption” over the past ten years is that the true advantage of disruptors has been business models built on a form of regulatory arbitrage that disadvantages those already disadvantaged. Uber, Airbnb, Amazon Prime delivery, and many other “disruptive” businesses are predicated upon circumventing regulations and tax codes with sometimes severe knock-on effects, from creating modern-day serfdom to artificially driving up home prices.

With the current COVID-19 crisis, this has come into sharp relief in restaurant delivery. While Grubhub, Uber Eats, Doordash, etc., all provide great convenience to the customer, they’re also parasites that are busy eating their hosts.

So, it’s heartening to see people developing tech products designed to disrupt the disruptors (or parasites as they should be more accurately termed). Help Main Street, originally formed to support small businesses by facilitating the purchase of gift cards has now added direct ordering links to over 30,000 restaurants and businesses. Please, next time you’re considering Grubhub, Doordash, Uber Eats etc, use Help Main Street instead.

This is just a single example of a heartening drive toward “spontaneous entrepreneurship,” where the digitally literate are building products designed for good. For example, Help Supply that connects healthcare workers to grocery shopping and childcare, Frontline Foods raising money to support restaurants and feed frontline workers, and You Probably Need a Haircut, providing, you guessed it, live online haircutting tutorials from an out of work barber.

2. Ready to try something new? I sure know I am.

Tl;dr: Now might be a good time for something new.

In 2018, Richard Shotton, author of “The Choice Factory” found that people who’d been through a major life event were 2.5X more likely to try new brands afterward. It seems like a strange effect at first glance, but makes sense when you think about it. When big important things happen in our lives it’s like hitting a reset button. It opens us up to new experiences we’ve never tried before.

Increasingly, it looks like COVID-19 might be just that kind of event, but scaled to the population of the earth. Based on new research, consumers are considerably more likely to have tried new brands in the past few weeks (One of the authors shared data with me from a followup study that shows no drop-off in these results longitudinally). Importantly, the data suggests only a third of this is due to a preferred brand not being available, lending credence to the view that most brands mis-label repeat purchase behavior as loyalty. More likely, as Byron Sharp puts it, your loyal customers are just someone else’s customers that buy from you occasionally.

This has some big implications. Unlike the “spontaneous entrepreneurs,” a decidedly lacklustre marketing response by many big brands to our current situation, mainly limited to maudlin “we’re here for you” advertising and lower advertising spend, suggests a big opportunity for younger, scrappier brands that can provide access to meaningful value right now. When we add the fact that media costs are lower right now due to the advertising pullback, and we see the potential of a perfect storm for new brands to take and build share. It also adds some context to the announcement that P&G are to maintain marketing investments during the crisis (they have much to defend, and sales are going up) while Coca-Cola say they will not (Their sales are taking a lockdown mandated hit right now. Based on this research, their market share will likely decline).

More broadly, it supports the observation that within capitalism's creative destruction, the moments of greatest creativity tend to stem from the ashes of destruction. In other words, many of the world’s most interesting companies and products tend to launch during times of recession.

3. Is marketing changing during the new abnormal? Nope.

Tl;dr: For better or worse, CV-19 will sort the wheat from chaff.

Among the long list of things changing forever due to CV-19, plenty of column inches focus on marketing. Unfortunately, much of it is nonsense. Or to put it more accurately, it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what marketing is.

You see, the problem with much of the advice is that it equates marketing with communications rather than the fundamental role of marketing, which is to create value. So while there are marketers responding right now by piling into the cheapest programmatic CPM’s they can find, sort of like throwing a hail Mary pass that’s only getting half-way to the end zone and with nobody waiting to catch it (but hey, the throw looks spectacular), the real marketers out there will be doing what really good marketers have always done, which is the hard-yards of figuring out where the value is and what they need to do to create and capture it.

This requires application of the skills that have gone dormant for many modern marketers, like market research to find unmet needs and understand people’s emotional state, segmentation to identify your most valuable prospects and what they’re looking for, pricing analysis to understand where people are willing to make trade-offs, being creative and innovative with these inputs across the complete marketing mix, and simultaneously acting as the interface between the customer and rest of the executive team. Yes, there’s plenty of comms work that needs to get done, but the real job of marketing right now is the same as it’s always been: Strategically understanding where value is and then enabling the company to create and capture it in a way that best serves both the customer and the organization.

4. Change that outlasts the disease? The precipitous acceleration of existing trends.

Tl;dr: 5 year changes are happening in weeks and months.

Something that’s been largely hidden among the pronouncements of a “new normal” is that many of the biggest changes are in fact a hyper-acceleration of pre-existing trends. As a result, what’s most surprising isn’t the trends themselves, but the speed at which COVID-19 has accelerated them.

Big Tech was an increasingly dominant monopolistic force prior to the current crisis, now it’s being supercharged. Income inequality was a trend prior to the crisis and now it’s driving deeper. Attendance of in-person conferences and trade-shows was waning and now they’ve stopped altogether. Local news, rural hospitals, and traditional retailers were struggling before and now many will be extinct in a few months time.

I generally try to avoid making too many predictions because, as a species, we’re consistently terrible at getting them right, but I do suspect that some of the most pervasive changes moving forward will be those based on an acceleration of pre-existing trends rather than completely new ones.

The accelerating effect of the world’s largest work from home experiment is likely to have a permanent impact when we find that productivity doesn’t drop (some reports suggest it’s actually increasing), factory automation is likely to accelerate because you don’t need to socially distance a robot on the assembly line. Equally, voice technology is likely to become more pervasive as it doesn’t require touch to activate. Commercial activity that was only slowly moving online before is likely to stay there in the future, like telemedicine. And retailers who’ve been forced to get creative with their e-commerce activities are likely to remain so.

Much of the other stuff, like wearing masks, staying away from each other, not flying to glamorous destinations, and not going out to restaurants. I’m not sure they’ll outlast the disease by much.