The Season For Creativity

There's a famous Lenin quote that goes: "There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”

This past Spring had a few of those weeks, where years of change seemed to happen overnight and everything was uncertain except for the fact that businesses needed a heavy dose of creativity to stay afloat.

Many of us were adjusting to working from home, trying to navigate being parents, teachers, and partners all while simultaneously trying to guide our businesses through an extremely difficult market. What's amazing to me is not only that many companies survived, but that many thrived by finding new and interesting ways to serve their customers.

Now that we're through the sunny days of Summer that allowed us to roam outdoors safely, we're entering into another phase where many of the outdoor solutions we had created will need to be packed up and put away. Gone are the sidewalk-patios, fitness classes at the beach, and parking lots converted into showrooms. In their place will be restrictions, limitations, and opportunities.

It's on us as creative business people to use what we learned in the Spring to push through this next challenge. We're no longer under-prepared. We've all learned to Zoom, which means that our customers are more likely to understand when we tell them we're delivering our services virtually. We've had time to build our online stores' web-based booking, so the lack of a front desk interaction should no longer hold us back. We've even shifted the way we communicate with our customers, which means that we can more easily educate them about our new offerings.

There were so many bright spots of creativity in the Spring, and while this upcoming challenge is not one that any of us would have asked for, I'm excited to see how brands take it on.

Creativity Principles

Our team has had the opportunity to work on several of those creative pivots, so for those of you doing some planning of your own, here are a few principles that we've put together:

• Nothing is new, everything is accelerated. All of the successful pivots we've seen have taken advantage of trends that started long before the pandemic (ie. at-home delivery, virtual experiences).
• Solve different problems for the same people. During a crisis is not a time when people are going to build trust with new businesses. Instead of trying to branch out to new categories or markets, consider your existing customer and how you can provide value to them today.
• Scrappy is no longer good enough. In April people were forgiving if a new e-commerce offering was a mess, or if that webinar glitched. Now that we've all had time to adapt, people expect your digital experience to reflect the same level of quality as the rest of your brand.

Ironically, the good news is that we're never going back. We're going to keep the benefits we've built in this digital-first world so that when the time comes to resume roaming freely, the investments we've made today will only become more valuable in the future.

Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting