Yesterday I wrote about some of the personal changes in my life that occurred during Covid. On the the other side of the same coin are the changes going on in the commercial sector. Looking at the stock market, it’s apparent there’s been some clear winners during Covid. For a second, let’s put behind us the fact that correlations in the market is at an all time high right now, and look back a month to when markets were going down. Which stocks were going up then? Some of the big winners were Netflix, Zoom, Amazon, Costco and Etsy. Those are all interesting in because they’re vastly different companies. Their sectors are Entertainment, Communication, E-Commerce, Bulk Retail, and Arts and Crafts. It doesn’t take much analysis to understand why these sectors did well during a pandemic and forced lockdown, and how they tapped into behavior change.
The more interesting question for me is what will remain after Covid fades away? What behaviors will people discard, along with their subscriptions and side businesses? And will stick permanently? Covid in a way has been a forced experiment in working from home, telemedicine, communication and personal development. There are aspects of each of those that have changed behavior irrevocably. A large part of the population will prefer the new normal. But there’s also a big part of this experiment that people either find exciting for the novelty, or just don’t like. Those aspects and behaviors will disappear slowly, then quickly.
It was a nice surprise then to find out that McKinsey was doing some work on this during the crisis as well. And, as usual, they’ve presented their thoughts in a classic consultancy matrix. Because why not? If you look at their matrix, it expands on my thinking and provides some thoughtful predictions of the stickiness of each quadrant.
The third question is what kind of commercial businesses will be built on new behaviors consumers? All of these companies had products that fit a need of the consumer during the pandemic, but that weren’t built for a pandemic. If people truly have changed behaviors then I expect to see companies spring up that are built for them. I think the current products customers use for their new behaviors are inspiring entrepreneurs to build new products and companies. That’s exciting, and I’m looking forward to being a part of it.