What changes might be permanent – let’s start with the biggest driver of economic activity: consumers, looking at what’s changed in 2020 because of Covid. They want to continue working away from the office at least two days a week; only 26% want to do it full-time after the pandemic passes, a majority of the more than 2,000 people surveyed. For the long term Weekday, consumer buying behavior will be altered.
In long term, consumer buying behavior will be altered. Where should you put a physical location, on the retail side, and when you don’t know how consumer patterns will play out yet, how should you configure it? Will they return to pre-crisis behaviors? It’s very unlikely the post-crisis economy will look the same.
It won’t look the same a year from now what this tells me is that competition. New brands entered the market with different offerings when we see disruption as we did in the Great Recession. More often seeking new consumer demand, they went after your customers. Such as the co-working style business model in hair care, new models emerged; and a flood of new fitness brands that more narrowly targeted consumers than the big box gyms and where franchisees rent chairs to independent contractor stylists.
What you consider competition today, our own research for clients clearly shows this crisis will have even more dramatic changes. Often with much bigger technology integration, new entrants will come to market with offerings adjusted for a post-pandemic economy. What were your previous competitions will be internally focused on for the next few years some franchise brands as they stabilize their systems and modify their offerings. It’s not your typical recovery where returning to pre-crisis mode was expected, All of this will take a few years to fully understand.
This time around in the economic boom/bust cycle, going a bit more thoughtfully, doing more research on consumer behavior changes, All of this leads me to a single conclusion. A more thorough assessment of how stable the franchise management team is will guide consumer marketing and growth plans to a better outcome, more diligence on how a brand’s offering is being adjusted and supported.