The Time of Novel Utility
In August of 2019, 181 CEOs committed to lead their companies to benefit all stakeholders—customers, employees, suppliers and communities, in addition to shareholders. These businesses determined, rightly, that investing in workers and communities was the only way they could ensure being successful over the long term.
The announcement was noteworthy. It was a big shift from businesses being fully committed to shareholders to making the commitment to invest in benefiting stakeholders to build their businesses’ value over the long-term and into the future.
Today and over the next year, that commitment will be put to the test. A pandemic has taken hold with no clear end date. The economy is on shakier ground every day. Businesses are already calling for bailouts, and it’s become abundantly clear that society on the other side of this crisis will not look like the one we had before it.
The right thing to do now and into the future is to maintain that commitment to stakeholders. Yes, many businesses, especially small ones, are going to need help, but now is also a time where businesses should be offering more help than ever before.
There’s no point in naming names. We all have examples. But too many businesses let their first instinct in the face of this crisis be selling, not helping.
Now, is a time for businesses to lean into and live out a commitment to stakeholders—customers, employees, suppliers and communities, and marketing can lead the way.
Marketers shouldn’t be looking at how they can sell but instead look at the role their businesses used to play in people’s lives and what that role looks like in this new reality. Chances are things have changed. That role may have shifted, grown in importance or even became less important, but all successful brands created joy in the lives in their customers in one way or another before this started. Take that joy and find a way to do the right thing with it for your stakeholders in the context of this crisis.
I’m inspired by breweries making hand sanitizer, food delivery brands working to save restaurants, streaming services limiting bandwidth in Europe to save some bandwidth for everyone.
Conventional selling won’t work right now.
Now is a time of novel utility, and each and every brand needs to find out what the novel utility is for them and, in turn, everyone else.