Covid lessons can help brands today

Almost overnight, Covid forced businesses to pivot and adapt. Brands would do well to learn from these experiences and apply this dynamism to the challenges of today.

David Halter is chief strategy officer at Dentsu Creative

It’s been just over four years since our first lockdown: March 22, 2020.

Remember those limits on ­social gatherings? 1.5m distancing? Finite exercise times? Shop closures? And the toilet paper hoarding?

For those of us fortunate enough to have continued working from home, there was another part of Covid that kept things interesting: the pivot.

Yes, an overused and slightly squeamish business term, but gee, we moved fast in those early days.

As Harvard Business Review defined it, “pivoting” is a lateral move that creates enough value for the customer and the firm to share.

Way back in early 2020, ideas were executed in a heartbeat.

Everything from the glamorous floor decals on the train (they’re still there) to digital experiences being changed to include Covid-related checks, new pricing options, home delivery innovations, and even fully integrated ad campaigns to get us fully vaccinated.

It was amazing what we achieved when our way of life was threatened. Brand people, data people, media people, technology people, operations people, pricing people, HR people, finance people — all forgot about protecting their little silos and instead focused on bringing the best business ideas to life.

The stakes were high, balancing short-term survival along with long-term resilience and growth. The experience of businesses (and governments) was transformed at pace.

But since life has returned to some sort of “new normal”, it seems the silos have been built back up again and the creative pivoting has slowed.

But why the “siloism” again?

Perhaps as the employment market changed, managers are worried about protecting their patch? Or as economic uncertainty sweeps the newsfeed, more executives are waiting and watching before they push the button on a new idea or innovation?

The causes aside, the symptoms of “siloism” (you heard it here first) are more worrying. It’s been well-documented that Australia has a productivity problem.

The Reserve Bank states a number of factors impacting the issue. The first on their list is lack of “business dynamism”, highlighting that Australian businesses might have lost their creative mojo. They point to slowing rates of creative innovation, technology adoption, and most importantly, profit.

Would a creative pivot help push Australia’s challenged supply chains that have struggled to regain a positive new normal post Covid? AI could be the creative pivot needed to explore how to best digitise this world and connect Australia better to its Asia Pacific community, and onto the rest of the world.

Innovation and entrepreneurship were embraced in the Covid era — potentially because there were no other choices, but businesses must look back and bring that culture into the now so we can push forward into the never before and start moving faster once again.

Consumers expect it. They even might just demand it. Consumers are holding businesses to higher standards from an experience and cultural values perspective. They want businesses to move with the times, move with pace and meet them in modern times, the status quo is no longer enough.

So, as we all search for growth that’s increasingly harder to find, perhaps Covid is far enough behind us to look back and say “what worked well in those times?” And can we apply it to today’s productivity-prone economy?

The Covid era forced businesses and their leaders to pivot, to embrace creative thinking and put the consumer at the core. It may have been crisis thinking but while we can move on from toilet paper hoarding, train station floor decals and social distancing, we need to grab hold of the spark that the crisis created.

Less silos, less friction, more collaboration and more ideas are what might help us out of this economic funk. The Covid days were hard, and no one wants to go back there but there is some gold to be learned about how we all came together to achieve an almighty pivot.

David Halter is chief strategy officer at Dentsu Creative.