Four Strong Approaches for reviving business demand post COVID-19

Thanks again for taking the time to read about some of our work and how we are helping businesses through COVID-19. This week we look at how steps can be taken to begin reviving demand for your business.

As we enter phase 3 of the easing restrictions, we are finally seeing the reopening of restaurants to more than 10 people, gyms start to restart your memberships and offices open their doors to some of their staff. A strong indication of positive times ahead.

We have seen over the last few weeks massive eagerness to actually restart and get back to normal…it is almost touchable…after all, being locked down for the last 3 months has definitely worn off for most.

So what is next?

With all of this uptick in organisational activity, there are more questions that remain now to be answered by senior leadership:

1. What is our financial health looking like both short and long term?
2. How are our suppliers and consumers? How does this stress on them change our business?
3. How long is it going to take for demand to return?
4. Is there going to be any further economic collapse?

I wrote a few weeks ago in relation to the importance and necessity of undertaking a recovery strategy (and any other business continuity strategies), but it is important to focus specifically on how a business can revitalise its demand, and capture sales in both old, but also potentially new markets post COVID-19.

Prior Articles Below:

• Recovery Strategy – How it can help you with crisis management
• What you should be doing to drive recovery from COVID-19

Now, with low consumer confidence, a larger than normal population base now unemployed, or having reduced incomes, and significant economic pressures more widely across Australia, there will no doubt be demand reductions and pressures on capturing the customer base that you may have previously held. 

So how can your business target and revive demand again?

Any recovery strategy will have key actions to be undertaken as part of your relaunch plan. One of the key objectives of this is to drive your demand back into the “green”, and focus should be placed on the areas presented below.

Understand your Customers & their own impact from COVID-19

Now firstly, your approach will depend if you are B2C (Business to Consumer) or B2B (Business to Business) company. 

B2C

This business type will need to quickly understand the impact of COVID-19 on household purchasing power, as well as their confidence in the economy and the confidence of their household through the economy. How has COVID-19 impacted your customer’s consumption habits? 

This will determine the customer’s ability to spend on your products or services.

Given that currently 1 in 5 people (20.2% of the population) are currently either unemployed or underutilised and looking for more work, impacts on discretionary spending will be substantial, and unlikely to properly begin to recover through to 2021.

Further to this, this impact is also non-financial. With the increased health and safety awareness, businesses must also work to understand how their customer base will want to spend their money (if and when they can)…for instance, for customers with strong health concerns, offering them seamless online capability is really the leading solution.

B2B

For businesses operating in a B2B environment, strong understanding of the new expectations on your goods and services will be required. Including supply constraints.

Taking the time to deep dive into your current and ongoing exposure to develop mitigation strategies will prove to be extremely valuable.

B2B companies should look also understand the impacts on the industries in which they also serve. Each industry will have had a different exposure level from the COVID-19 crisis, and therefore will potentially need subtle nuances to the approach taken to recapture that customer. 

Restoration of Trust

Regardless of how we look at it, everyone is now far more aware of their financial exposure and highly vigilant regarding their health and safety. Time needs to be taken to define what a safe customer experience looks like for your business, with subsequent actions to implement them.

With this in mind, businesses need to focus on hows they restore customer trust while abiding by local laws and regulations relating to COVID-19. Adoption and communication of instore safe practices, online capability, improved customer proximity and contactless payment/delivery methods are all examples of this – resulting in progressively improving customer trust.

Introduce more Tactical Pricing

Now, with recovering demand post-COVID-19, tactical pricing should be strongly considered. Tactical pricing is the targeted manipulation of a product or service price to achieve an increase in your demand. This can include aggressive sales strategies, price-cutting/bundling, and customer loyalty pricing. This activity is extremely challenging when there are considerable market constraints on supply and demand across most industries. 

Fundamentally, your goal here should be to create ongoing favourable trading conditions that improve the progressive rebound of consumption. Tactical pricing is a strong method for doing this. 

The challenge to be aware is that there becomes a value chain issue, where if the pricing is to tactical, you will be faced with increased pressures on your own suppliers (who will be experiencing similar COVID-19 pressures of their own), or your own profitability.

If increased tactical pricing is adopted, it is recommended that there be considerable monitoring and management of the promotional or discount models being adopted. When doing this, it should be considered that communication with other sector players is undertaken as well in order to control any competitive approaches or price wars that can ultimately can destroy your product value.

Optimise your marketing approaches

Finally, your business will need to ensure that its product or service offering (and the associated marketing channels and approaches) continues to align with customer demand post-COVID-19. This includes improving the ability for your customers to interact with you and your business through digital (and other non-face to face) methods.

The Cirrus team are here to help you if you have any questions, and we can be contacted via our contact form here, and we wish you the best of luck as we all begin our recovery from COVID-19!