There is a crack in everything and that’s how the light gets in! So goes the adage.
Consumer behaviourists are all too familiar with heuristics – the mental short cuts that help consumers make quick decisions to economize the effort involved in decision making. For those who aren’t familiar with heuristics, these could be…
Rules or mental markers that could guide you even if you were blindfolded, to walk down the supermarket aisle and pick up the exact pack of multi-grain loaf from amongst fifty other options.
Hard-wired attitudes that prevent a woman from even entering the shop that sells the latest robotic cleaner, since she considers the human equivalent she employs far better at taking her instructions.
The habit that leads the elderly lady to the milk booth early morning to pick a fresh pack as soon as the milk delivery truck arrives even though the same milk is home-delivered minutes later.
Our moral judgements / guilt that have so far led us to believe that ‘screen time’ is a bad thing for our children
These heuristics make consumer behaviour sticky and tricky. Since these heuristics get created as the mind’s survival strategy against a deluge of choices, help end the unending debate between right and wrong. And whatever is a matter of survival isn’t easy for us to change. Unless there is something else that comes and threatens our survival. And then the needle shifts, just like that, over night. A lot of marketing time and money is spent on identifying how to create a disruption in these set patterns of thinking / behaving.
And now the disruption has happened! With Covid-19, so much has shifted so suddenly that it would perhaps take the world a while to understand what happened and how many of these shift are here to stay. Some shifts have already begun to bubble up on the surface.
What was at the fringes has / will soon become mainstream.
While many are still grappling with getting the execution right, the ‘idea’ of Online Education has in principle become acceptable amongst parents and educational institutes alike. While online education was always inching it’s way into people’s lives, it was always seen as a poorer cousin of the traditional approach and never really enjoyed the holy-grail status. The role of the teacher, the authority of the institution of school, the efficacy and reach of a book as a medium of learning were unquestioned by parents and teachers. By contrast, in less than two months, online courses and teachers have filled the market. From French to Yoga or even music, dance or art there is no dearth of online resources. Now that everyone has joined the online bandwagon what will really separate the wheat from the chaff is the individuals and institutes that are able to approach online pedagogy with a fresh perspective rather than just downsizing the offline methods to fit the small screen, which most so far seem to be doing.
Another related idea in education that has caught everyone’s fancy has been the idea of home schooling. With schools closed and learning expected to happen at home – suddenly home-schooling which so far only a fringe idea adopted by a niche community of parents as the chosen approach for educating their children, is now a subject of many dinner-table conversations.
Home schooling as an approach is markedly different in its philosophy from schooling-at-home during a crisis. Home schooling began as an alternative movement against the archaic practices of a traditional system, which emphasized conformity and standardisation in teaching methods, that some believed, seemed misaligned to what we needed as a society to progress and thrive i.e. diversity in talent and thinking perspectives. Getting children to attend online sessions that last 4-6 hours interspersed with assignments and worksheets is far from home schooling.
The lesson in this for all of us is if the fabric is new, the yardstick would have to change too.
The emergency of the D-I-Y culture
DIY (do-it-yourself) has been a part of life in the west since the 1970s. The same value that is has now become popular in the Indian socio-political discourse as ‘amtanirbharta’ (independence).
The lockdown initiated people into new directions. Urban India that largely depends on house-help spent almost two months doing their own chores, cooking their own meals, doing their own hair-cuts, attending to repairs, health issues etc. with minimal outside help. Though house-help has appeared on the scene in parts, the pandemic with its crests and troughs might in the long term create the impetus for a shift towards home-automation solutions for home and personal care.
Businesses that have been traditionally service oriented could shift towards productizing their offer. DIY kits for salon or spa treatments. DIY meal-prep-boxes with the recipe card, ingredients in the right quantities and perhaps even fancy looking disposable crockery to prepare a gourmet meal in minutes. An emerging Montessori school in Bangalore has even created it’s own Montessori-material-kit to aid parents as they embark on their journey as teachers.
Connecting with the consumer through access
While on one hand social distancing restricted access, the brands, services or individuals that have stood out at such an unprecedented time, are the ones that have overcome the access barrier and created a real (physical) or an emotional connect with their customers. The medical community that has so far been averse to any remote-consultation has shifted almost entirely to phone / video consultations. Some banks (HDFC for instance) sent mobile ATMs to communities to make it easy for people to carry out banking transactions. Retailers for stationery, books and toys created extensive WhatsApp communication to facilitate purchases before their e-stores could open. One of the most heart-warming online post I came across was about a maternity photo-shoot done by a photographer using iPhone Facetime app. The pictures were stunning.
If we look back at the last 3 months, I wouldn’t be wrong if I said that most of us have tried atleast a few products, vendors, services that were absolutely out of sync with our regular consumption pattern. While on one hand the economy is severely impacted as a result of Covid19, the pandemic has also given an unprecedented window for nimble small brands to capture a pie of the market that once was dominated by behemoths. The opportunity to convert the new consumer behaviour-bubbles that have just begun to surface, to unchallenged heuristics.
There are very few times, when life gives us the opportunity to start from a clean slate. Most of those moments involve the pain of letting go of all that was once familiar and comfortable. But in the vacuum that gets created also lies the opportunity to create something new.
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