You may have been reading a lot about how COVID-19 changes everything.
Actually, perhaps this is a contrarian point of view, but at Behaviorally (formerly PRS), we think that implication of the current crisis for business is actually somewhat different. Scott Galloway, a well-known, opinionated commentator on the business landscape whom we like to follow, says it this way in his blog, No Mercy/No Malice,
“Things won’t change as much as they will accelerate. While other crisis reshaped the future, COVID-19 is just making the future happen faster.”
Galloway’s post may deal with a vision of how higher education will be evolving, but it is not a stretch to see the same principle applying to most aspects of business, and certainly to market research.
If you have been paying attention at all over the last few years, you might already have observed that things were changing, or needed to change in our industry.
Over the last few years that has certainly been driving us at Behaviorally (formerly PRS) as we looked to the future. Methodically, as part of our innovation process, we have been building on decades of experience, and applying this expertise to the development of online solutions. These have complimented our in-person, in-context solutions to provide clients with unequivocally the best approaches for observing, understanding and predicting consumer and shopper behavior. Why? Because it just made sense. Clients need robust, agile, innovative digital solutions that work at the speed of business, and also give them confidence, because they are grounded in trusted and proven behavioral principles.
Sometimes people remember you based on who you were when they first met you. For clients who have known Behaviorally (formerly PRS) for many, many years, that might be through association with our early, best-in-class Shopper Labs, or in-person research solutions. But those have become acquainted with us more recently know us for our relentless preoccupation with introducing, iterating, refining and enhancing online solutions that give clients better decision support for engaging with consumers and shoppers. We are already substantially challenging the value clients get from the research supply chain, and hopefully instigating the conversations that will lead to the entire industry committing to get better . . . faster.
So, COVID-19 isn’t shaping our future . . . it is simply incentivizing us to accelerate the realization our vision of the future!
Today, we also saw another spot-on cartoon from Tom Fishburne, the Marketoonist, that illustrates the point:
Not only does he draw a great cartoon, but Tom synthesizes the idea of “accelerating the future” quite succinctly in his post:
“ . . . There’s still not a shared understanding of what digital transformation actually means. It stands for much more than suddenly working from home over Zoom. It asks businesses to rethink how they deliver value to their customers in a digital world.”
That is exactly what fuels our innovation strategy and our impetus to iterate and enhance our behavioral solutions. So even once COVID-19 is behind us, you can count on Behaviorally (formerly PRS) to continue to provide clients with solutions that can help them succeed, in good times, as well as those that are more challenging.
THE AUTHOR
Alex Hunt is the CEO of Behaviorally (formerly PRS) and provided this blog post in April 2020 when he was serving as CEO of PRS IN VIVO USA.
Follow Alex on Twitter @AlexHunt84 or connect with him on LinkedIn.
