Hey everyone, welcome to Marketing by John. Today we're going to be talking about how you should embrace the change if Your goal is growth in 2021 and beyond. It is literally Literally the only thing you can do if you want to grow now this smart business Leaders out there already know this and if you're not quite there yet You will really fast understand that embracing change is the best possible business strategy for growth If you haven't experienced I mean actually I can't even say that because anybody in the remote vicinity of a leadership position Just experienced this in 2020 So here we are early 2021 and if you were like I said remotely sniffing a leadership position You just went through a forced Change so I retract my previous statement you now all know how important change is Because it's the only way to survive this wasn't even the case just because of COVID I mean this was the case before embracing change as a leader was the best way to Basically sniff out the things that weren't efficient or ineffective and we're not remarkable and Going all in on the things that were or the things that could be or will be in the next five years But COVID has now exposed us all to realizing this so let's look at the concrete examples of how Almost all industries have been leapt It's like we leapt we leapfrog ten years a whole full decade We basically bounced over it in one year so 2020 was like Ten years of change smashed into one year Number one business travel so COVID in the pandemic required us all to stop traveling for business So what did that do to the business travel industry crushed it? I can't remember the numbers But I want to say it was like a 1.4 billion dollar spent on business travel alone in 2019 Somebody go Google that and prove me wrong, but so business travel that went down You know what went up video conferencing so video conferencing has been around forever Skype I mean that's been around for more than a decade, but you look at zoom and Google hangouts and Uber conference. I don't know and all the other ones out there They've absolutely crushed it because people had no choice, okay? That would have happened over a decade Maybe I may be more actually maybe a couple of decades for people to really realize that I don't need to spend You know $10,000 from my entire team to travel over to Asia to meet with our manufacturers for you know two hours Stay in the night in a hotel and then fly back instead. We can do a video conference with a translator and You know skip a lot of that and probably save about 9,555 dollars or whatever so You know that would have taken some time video chatting that would have taken it's still people are still getting zoom fatigue and and still not loving it So I don't know how long it would have taken for businesses to adopt a video chatting Really to the extent that we had to I don't know that it'll ever would have happened I don't say never but who knows anyways, though That's how an example of how we've you know skip forward 10 years in a year in that respect Look at on the consumer side curbside service at home delivery And the basically the convenience factor of getting whatever we want as quick as we want it without actually spending time on the thing Great example is a store which I hope all of you know and have experienced Wegmans come on if you don't know Wegmans if you've never been in a Wegmans You're missing out on one of the past grocery shopping experiences of your life Even if you don't go into the store Because of pant the pandemic, you know the food and the actual groceries that you can get are it's just I don't even know how to Compare it. You'll just have to go talk to somebody who's been to a Wegmans But when the pan's amicette They rapidly adjusted to be able to serve its customers and I don't know how they did financially But I know from an experience standpoint as an avid customer that goes probably twice a week they crushed it So as soon as you couldn't go to a store anymore they they went all in on Instacart and curbside delivery So you could order your groceries through their app you could order groceries through You know through Instacart Instacart would deliver them to you or you could go pick them up yourself As soon as they started to open up a little bit more they did take out meals you could get your dinners packaged And go and pick them up because they couldn't do their their eatery buffet service anymore And so they just they pivoted so fast they embraced the change better than almost any other company Larger medium-sized large company that I've I've seen Another local sort of smaller example is of a good friend who owns a few restaurants great brands great restaurant concepts and When the restaurant industry took a huge hit He also went all in on grub hub went all in on marketing went all in on hey, you know Don't forget you can pick your food up here. We got specials. We got things You know that are delivery only and special only pick up only And and they did well, you know hard to navigate the experience of going out and eating is something that we all yearn to come back, but but that quick pivot allowed him to survive and thrive through the Through the pandemic this is equally so here I'm talking about businesses, but this is equally as As as prevalent in the marketing space. So what happened in marketing? So in marketing we're all about communicating messages, right? So because we went out less Digital became the no-brainer for everybody it already was for all consumer brands, but for any B2B manufacturing LinkedIn YouTube that all become much more of a game changer and a playing field that wasn't previously there email outreach digital communication Virtual pitch decks virtual showrooms Not sure if you've heard of Matterport, but this is what they do they stitched together pictures so you can have like a virtual showroom Digital catalogs all of this stuff Happened in a course of a year when some of these companies wouldn't even have been thinking about it for another decade So in the marketing space not only did we see sort of the B2B manufacturing side of things Jump forward we saw consumers start to consume Way more than they did before Tiktok blew up YouTube blew up OTT blew up Netflix consumption blew up the expansion of other OTT companies IMDbtv came out and and put out what I can see is one of the first Add supported OTT platforms out there so over the top OTT And so like Pandora and Spotify did with their freemium model you could you could download those apps for free and listen to music But there would be ads in it Netflix didn't do this Amazon video didn't do this HBO didn't do this IMDB did they have original content good movies and series on IMDB TV Yeah, go download on your Amazon Firestick or Apple TV or whatever, but they have ads like commercials and When I mean the shows are awesome So they adopted very fast I have no idea if they were planning this before 2020 but but as far as I can see they launched it in 2020 or at least really grew it So consumers consumption of media skyrocket Because we would have been having experiences because we would have been going out and doing things and taking vacations if COVID never hit This would have taken much more time for these platforms to develop this way You know Spotify but paying Joe Rogan $100 million During a pandemic to sign him just shows you the amount of Content that consumers were consuming during the pandemic So all industries have leapt forward a decade generally the ones that succeeded during 2020 were the ones that adopted to Adapted to the change or or changed they were not the ones waiting for 2019 to come back waiting for the pandemic to end They were the ones saying you know what this is how things are let's dive in So the ones that dove into Tic Tac were successful the ones that are diving into an app called Clubhouse now They're the ones that are successful the ones that went all in on YouTube long-form content as a brand They're the ones that are successful. So my point is tax messaging go all in and tax messaging you'll be successful So my point is embrace the change do not pout do not look back to 2019 move forward Great quote by Wayne Gretzky Skate to where the puck is going to be that's what you need to do right now to be successful Alright everyone if you found this podcast successful That if you found this podcast helpful make sure you like it share it with a friend and don't forget to subscribe Subscribe on YouTube if you like watching this subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform if you'd rather listen to it But that way you won't miss any of my future shows about the most important things in marketing that you need to know We'll see you next time You