• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, April 14, 2020

It was predictable. Humans are starting to do what humans do. We are beginning to shift gears, working our way through the stages of shock. We are daring to look beyond today and wondering what tomorrow might be like. Very smart people, like “Sapiens” author Yuval Noah Harari, are concerned about what we may trade away in the teeth of this crisis.

Others, like philosopher Barbara Muraca, climate change advocate Greta Thurnberg and Media Insider’s own Kaila Colbin,  are hoping that this might represent a global reset moment for us. 

Perhaps this will finally break our obsession with continual year after year growth, fueled by our urges to acquire and consume. We in the advertising and marketing business kept dumping gas on this unsustainable dumpster fire. There is hope by some — including myself — that COVID-19 will be a kind of shock therapy, convincing us to take a kinder, gentler approach to both the planet and each other. 

My own crystal ball-gazing is on a much-reduced scale. Specifically, I’m wondering what advertising and marketing might be like in our immediate future. I started by looking back at what history can teach us about recovery from a crisis.

Both world wars resulted in explosions of consumerism. One could probably make the argument that the consumerism that occurred after World War II has continued pretty much uninterrupted right to the current day. We basically spent our way out of the dotcom implosion of 1999-2002 and the Great Recession of 2007-2009. 

But will this be different? I think it will, for three reasons. 

One, both world wars repressed consumer demand for a matter of years. With World War I it was four years, plus another three marked by the Spanish flu pandemic, and a brief but sharp recession as the economy had to shift gears from wartime to peace time. With World War II, it was six years of repressed consumerism.  

Secondly, the wars presented those of us here in North America with a very different psychological landscape. We went “over there” to fight and then “came home” when it was done. The war wasn’t on our front stoop. That gave us both physical and emotional distance after the war was over. 

Finally, when the war was over, it was over. The world had to adjust to a new normal, but the fighting had stopped. That gave consumers a clear mental threshold to step beyond. You didn’t have to worry that you might be called back into service on any day, returning once again to the grim reality that was. 

For these three reasons, I think our consumer mentality may look significantly different in the coming months. As we struggle back to whatever normal is between now and the discovery of a vaccine -- currently estimated at 12 to 18 months -- we will have a significantly different consumer reality. 

We don’t have years of pent-up consumer demand that will wash away any pragmatic thoughts of restraint. We have been dealing with a crisis that has crept into our very homes. It has been present in every community, every neighborhood. And, most importantly, we will be living in a constant state of anxiety and fear for the foreseeable future. These three factors are going to have a dramatic impact on our desire to consume.

Blogger Tomas Pueyo did a good job of outlining what our new normal may look like in his post "The Hammer and The Dance." We are still very much in the “Hammer” phase, but we are beginning to wonder what the “Dance” may look like. 

In our immediate future, we are going to hear a lot about the basic reproductive rate,  denoted as R₀ or R naught. This is the measure of the number of cases, on average, an infected person will cause during their infectious period. A highly infectious disease, like measles, has an R naught of between 12 and 18. Current estimates on COVID-19 put its R naught between 1.5 and 3.5. Most models assume a R naught of 2.4 or so. 

This is important if we want to understand what our habits of consumption might look like until a vaccine is found. As long as that R naught number is higher than 1, the disease continues to spread. If we can get it lower than 1, then the numbers stabilize and eventually decline. 

The “Dance” Pueyo refers to is the actions that need to be taken to keep the R naught number lower than 1 without completely stalling the economy. With extremely restrictive measures you theoretically could reduce the R naught to zero — but in the process, you shut down the entire economy. Relax the restrictions too much and the R naught climbs back up into exponentially increasing territory. 

Much of the commentary I’m reading is assuming we will go back to “normal” or some variation of it. But the new “normal” is this dance, where we will be balanced on the knife’s edge between human and economic cost. 

For the next several months we will be teetering from one side to the other. At best, we can forget about widespread travel, large public gatherings and sociability as we previously knew it. At worst, we go back into full lockdown.

This is the psychological foundation our consumption will be based on. We will be in a constant state of anxiety, which marketing strategies will have to address. 

Further, marketing needs to factor in this new normal in an environment where brand messaging is no longer a unilateral exercise, but is amplified and bent through social media. Frayed nerves make for a very precarious arena in which to play a game we’re still learning the rules of. We can expect ideological and ethical divisions to widen and deepen during the Dance. 

The duration of the dance will be another important factor to consider when we think about marketing. If it goes long enough, our temporary behavioral shifts become habits. 

The changes that are forced upon us may become permanent. Will we ever be comfortable again in a crowded restaurant or bar? Will we pay $300 to be jammed into a stadium with 50 thousand other people? We don’t know the answers to these questions yet.

Successful marketing depends on being able to anticipate the mood of the audience. The Dance will make that much more difficult. We will be racing up and down Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs  at a frenzied pace that would make a game of Snakes and Ladders seem mild by comparison. 

In normal times we spend our lifetimes scaling Abraham Maslow’s elegant model from the bottom, fulfilling our most basic physical needs,  to the top: an altruistic concern for the greater good. Most of us spend much of our time stuck somewhere north of the middle, obsessed with our own status and shoring up our self-esteem. It’s this relatively stable mental state that the vast majority of marketing is targeted to.

But in a chronic crisis mode like that foretold by the Dance, we can crash from the top to the bottom of the hierarchy in the blink of an eye. And we will all be doing this at different times in different locations.

The Dance introduces a consumer scenario marketers have never encountered before. We will crave comfort and security. We will be desperate for glimpses of positivity. And it’s certain that our values and beliefs will shift -- but it’s difficult to predict in which direction. While my hope is that we become kinder and gentler people, I suspect it will be a toss-up. It could well go the other way.

If you thought marketing was tough before, buckle up!