• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, March 9, 2021

For most of us, it’s been a year living with the pandemic. I was curious what my topic was a year ago this week. It was talking about the brand crisis at a certain Mexican brewing giant when its flagship brand was suddenly and unceremoniously linked with a global pandemic. Of course, we didn’t know then just how “global” it would be back then.

Ahhh -- the innocence of early 2020.

The past year will likely be an historic inflection point in many societal trend lines. We’re not sure at this point how things will change, but we’re pretty sure they will change. You can’t take what has essentially been a 12-month anomaly in everything we know as normal, plunk it down on every corner of the globe and expect everything just to bounce back to where it was.

If I could vault 10 years in the future and then look back at today, I suspect I would be talking about how our relationship with technology changed due to the pandemic. Yes, we’re all sick of Zoom. We long for the old days of actually seeing another face in the staff lunchroom. And we realize that bingeing “Emily in Paris” on Netflix comes up abysmally short of the actual experience of stepping in dog shit as we stroll along the Seine.

C’est la vie.

But that’s my point. For the past 12 months, these watered-down digital substitutes have been our lives. We were given no choice. And some of it hasn’t sucked. As I wrote last week, there are times when a digital connection may actually be preferable to a physical one.

There is now a whole generation of employees who are considering their work-life balance in the light of being able to work from home for at least part of the time. Meetings the world over are being reimagined, thanks to the attractive cost/benefit ratio of being able to attend virtually. And, for me, I may have permanently swapped riding my bike trainer in my basement for spin classes in the gym. It took me a while to get used to it, but now that I have, I think it will stick.

Getting people to try something new -- especially when it’s technology -- is a tricky process. There are a zillion places on the uphill slope of the adoption curve where we can get mired and give up. But, as I said, that hasn’t been an option for us in the past 12 months. We had to stick it out. And now that we have, we realize we like much of what we were forced to adopt. All we’re asking for is the freedom to pick and choose what we keep and what we toss away.

I suspect  many of us will be a lot more open to using technology now that we have experienced the tradeoffs it entails between effectiveness and efficiency. We will make more room in our lives for a purely utilitarian use of technology, stripped of the pros and cons of “bright shiny object” syndrome.

Technology typically gets trapped at both the dread and pseudo-religious devotion ends of the Everett Rogers Adoption Curve. Either you love it, or you hate it. Those who love it form the market that drives the development of our technology, leaving those who hate it further and further behind.

As such, the market for technology tends to skew to the “gee whiz” end of the market, catering to those who buy new technology just because it’s new and cool. This bias has embedded an acceptance of planned obsolescence that just seems to go hand-in-hand with the marketing of technology. 

My previous post about technology leaving seniors behind is an example of this. Even if seniors start out as early adopters, the perpetual chase of the bright shiny object that typifies the tech market can leave them behind.

But COVID-19 changed all that. It suddenly forced all of us toward the hump that lies in the middle of the adoption curve. It has left the world no choice but to cross the “chasm” that  Geoffrey Moore wrote about 30 years ago in his book "Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers." He explained that the chasm was between “visionaries (early adopters) and pragmatists (early majority),” according to Wikipedia.

This has some interesting market implications. After I wrote my post, a few readers reached out saying they were working on solutions that addressed the need of seniors to stay connected with a device that is easier for them to use and is not subject to the need for constant updating and relearning. Granted, neither of them was from Apple nor Google, but at least someone was thinking about it.

As the pandemic forced the practical market for technology to expand, bringing customers who had everyday needs for their technology, it created more market opportunities. Those opportunities create pockets of profit that allow for the development of tools for segments of the market that used to be ignored.

It remains to be seen if this market expansion continues after the world returns to a more physically based definition of normal. I suspect it will.

This market evolution may also open up new business model opportunities -- where we’re actually willing to pay for online services and platforms that used to be propped up by selling advertising. This move alone would take technology a massive step forward in ethical terms. We wouldn’t have this weird moral dichotomy where marketers are grieving the loss of data (as fellow Media Insider Ted McConnell does in this post) because tech is finally stepping up and protecting our personal privacy.

Perhaps -- I hope -- the silver lining in the past year is that we will look at technology more as it should be: a tool that's used to make our lives more fulfilling.