How to think about modeling the broader impact of COVID-19 on our culture, society, and businesses.
Lately, I’ve been on a lot of calls with senior leaders at large Fortune 100 companies. On each of these calls, I’ve been consistently asked the same question -
How should my organization be thinking about tracking and measuring the long-term impact of COVID-19 on culture, our society, and of course, our business?
In a time of economic distress such as this, a lot of companies have already jumped the gun to study what consumers are saying about the coronavirus through means like social media listening, online panels and such. In most cases, consumers are being asked about their current and future behavior, especially in relation to product categories that are seeing the most amount of variation in sales and revenue. All in the hopes of trying to guage what the world might look like when humanity emerges on the other end of this pandemic.
Needless to say, this kind of an ad hoc approach isn’t going to work — certainly not for the purpose of trying to figure out the broader impact of the Coronavirus on consumer culture.
To model, track, and measure the impact on culture, we need to first take a step back to think about what culture is in the first place.
Culture is nothing but a set of shared meanings that get created inadvertently through the natural and organic interactions of people in society. These shared meanings make an issue relevant to a certain part of the population, and similarly, make the same issue less or completely irrelevant to others. Importantly though, we can’t control how these meanings get created by people. We can only study and model it.
So, if we need to create a framework with which to understand the emerging impact of COVID-19 on consumer culture, we need to think about tracking the broader set of contextual meanings that revolve around the topic of the coronavirus, beyond the obvious discussion of symptoms, infection rates, healthcare, etc. Think of it this way — when people talk about the virus, they talk directly about all these common and obvious topics — from symptoms and treatment through to the availability of toilet paper. But each of these obvious topics also give birth to other conversations that are not-so-obvious. In essence, such conversations are indirectly related to a discussion of the coronavirus. But they are still contextual to the discussion nonetheless. They likely sit on the outer periphery of that contextual boundary, but they’re there.
Most importantly, these are the topics that will exhibit the most amount of growth and change because as people understand COVID-19 more in the coming weeks and months, they will start to shift their attention onto the broader impact of the pandemic on their lives, which is exactly when new meanings start to slowly enter the contextual universe of COVID-19 of take flight. These are the meanings that we need to identify and track if we are to get a head-start on the broader impact of the virus on culture and our businesses.
Here’s a video that explains this concept.
