How to respond when the world turns upside down

Behavioural change typically takes a long time; attitudes don’t transform overnight and shifts recorded by tracking studies are usually very gradual. Until 2020. Since March last year, change has accelerated at an unparalleled pace, leaving businesses like O2 wondering how consumers were feeling and how to respond.

Speakers:

• Alison Bainbridge, Founder, Kokoro
• Laura Gillespie, Insight Director, Kokoro
• Claire Rainey, Head of Insight, O2

What you’ll learn:

• Killer insights from the last year and the business-critical things you need to know about the post-corona consumer
• Ideas on how to adapt traditional methods to deliver the speed and quality of insight required if successful ‘in flight’ decisions are to be made
• Real examples of how a large UK business has successfully reacted to challenging times
• Practical ways of driving innovation while working remotely
• A factbook for all attendees!

The impact of Covid-19 has left most organisations, including O2, reeling; trying to react fast while simultaneously adjusting to remote working.

O2’s stores – still the preferred purchasing channel for most shoppers – were forced to close. Live venues, a key communication channel for the brand, were shut down. Everything went digital and a mobile phone became a more crucial lifeline than ever.

This left big, unanswered questions. How were consumers feeling? What new behaviours were being adopted? And what should O2 do in response?

In normal times the answers to these questions would be all around us. But our coronaworld is different. For the most part we exist in our bubbles, and although the whole population is facing the same storm, we’re all in different boats. O2 needed a way to gauge life in those boats in a cost-effective manner.

Our first MRS webinar of 2021 shows how Kokoro responded with ‘The Score’ – a sentiment tracker launched in the first week of the pandemic, using an online survey of 2,000 people per week and over 1,000 hours of video interviews that follow the Covid-era journey of over 20 UK households.

It reveals how attitudes have changed, what the UK is doing differently, which shifts are temporary and which will stick around post crisis.

We hear the consumer perspective from Kokoro and learn how O2 has revolutionised its insight planning via a two-stream, short vs. longer-term approach – thereby discovering ways to optimise performance today and emerge stronger as the world recovers from Covid-19.

Learn how to ensure your business doesn’t go astray through senior stakeholders confusing ‘their life for that of the nation’, and how to avoid the trap of believing newspaper headlines often woefully out of touch with the real views of the nation.