Paradoxically this is a good time for every professional to sit back and do an audit of their goals, vision, strategy and action. It is important to realize that the market was already in a process of redefining every industry into a new shape and transition was expected eventually. The current unexpected pause, shall add high momentum to the evolution, since the need of market is drastically changing from ‘good to have’ to necessity.

The crisis happening today on the outbreak of COVID19 Pandemic is on every one and what determines the turnaround is, how you set the sail. The legendary economists and policy makers across the globe are warning us of an unscrupulous financial crunch and unprecedented negative growth. Despite institutional measures to reduce the impact taken by central banks, UN agencies, World Bank and IMF, a slow down is inevitable and the downward forecast in major indicators such as GDP, real Income, employment, manufacturing, wholesale retail sales etc.. are alarming.

In general, every business needs to be more resilient in adopting quick strategic deviations based on the market economy. This gives an upper hand to the small and medium sector, which are more agile in responding to the local market indicators by initiating turn-around processes without much process and procedural hurdles. Major chunk of the population is going through uncertainty and personal financial stress, which forces imperative strategies on portfolio alignment, pricing, bundling and very importantly on communication. This article is targeting the entrepreneurs and business managers of small industries, since the medium and higher companies may have their own arrangements to manage uncertainties.

Back to Normal:

Back to normal is a very casual term, which been used by many, during a tough time to indicate the resolve and start from where we left. Today’s challenge is that such a flow may be diverted through an unknown terrain, which will make the sail tougher. Every entrepreneur should anticipate surprises and have the strength to tackle it to their favor.

Bootstrap once again:

Almost all of us started with a bootstrap strategy, a while ago when our dreams and ideas started shaping up to a business. This restart, gives opportunities to implement corrected ideas where market experience, exposure, relationships and goodwill are current major advantages.

Portfolio alignment: It is a common practice that almost every company keep adding products and services to their portfolio as frequently as possible. Its time to look at it and evaluate how many of those products and services are still relevant to the upcoming market. If any of them is not convincing to you, certainly wont convince the market and should be eliminated from your portfolio. Irrelevant products and services in your portfolio may confuse the client and drain much time and energy explaining them for no use.

Pricing Strategy: The purchases are going to be on absolute necessity and the price factor will supersede all other factors in decision-making process at least for a period of time. Every company should look in to reduce their product or service cost by cutting down unnecessary elements to match the market expectations. Many companies are re-entering the market with existential strategy; a price war is quite predictable.

Product Bundling: Even though this is not a new concept or tactics in the market, but will be more relevant in the near future. By bundling products or services, either with your own or of third party, you may have a higher perceptual value for the consumer. Combining the marketing budget and sharing the logistics cost, shall bring a reduced cost to market and increase the competitiveness.

Communication Strategy: Companies should adopt more and more innovative digital platforms to grab the attention of their consumers. Your consumers are not on the streets or malls; they are all online especially from their mobile. Companies should priorities and accept mobile phones as their preferred devices to reach their potential customers and should use channels from simple SMS to highly sophisticated AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) bots to have constant interaction with consumers and to understand the consumer behavior. 

Innovative thinking: “Faster, Better, cheaper” will remain the major keywords and those who work towards innovations to achieve these criteria shall have a huge competitive edge. May be the existing products or services with small tweaks here and there, shall qualify and let the company move from red ocean to blue ocean, where the competition become irrelevant.

Boosters and Enablers:

Digital marketing should be the primary consideration in mass communication, as it works as a huge booster. Many company leaders have a miss understanding that, digital marketing means posting in social media. Social media is only one channel and there are many more such as affiliate marketing, mobile marketing, PPC, SEO, Proximity marketing, events, interactive campaigns as well as virtual and augmented reality for marketing. In any case the inevitable part is attractive content with simple and straightforward communication.

The level of technological influence in business and personal life, made every individual connected to every business and vice versa almost all the time. Incredible advancement happened in technical revolution also made it more democratic and affordable to all. Companies should adopt the future technologies without hesitation, since it helps them in rapid growth with high flexibility and quick scalability.

Future technology should not be a terminology used as, these are the technologies coming in future, rather than those are the technologies defining the future. AI (Artificial Intelligence) is now in the narrow intelligence form, still can help the businesses in decision-making, analytics, study customer behavior, spending patterns and ML (Machine learning) enables the computers to predict the market based on previous data, which enables businesses to make informed decision and cut the cost to market drastically. Big data analysis with ML and AI shall bring immense information to the people, which was always there but not in a usable form. Innovations in hardware and processing capacity along with quantum computing, enables the machines with unimaginable computing power. 5G network and IOT combination shall give us a control on any gadgets, automobiles, machineries and household devices to name few. Block chain technologies and its immense opportunities in a distributed environment are progressing drastically and the limits are un predictable.

Intention of this article is not to promote any technology to the readers, but to make them aware on what is available. How ever it is important for businesses to adopt only relevant technology for their advancement, which should be a perfect fit to their environment.

“Listen to your mind, analyze your thoughts and refine your ideas”

Dilip Paliyath

CEO Yospace International