The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc in the lives of many. The world’s economic growth has been widely impacted. Businesses are experiencing loss. Workers are being laid off, furloughs and pay cuts have become the normal news.
A global recession is inevitable, but businesses need to gain strength and start working toward a goal.
Strategy framework is the backbone to all businesses, the reason why most companies depend on their business strategy framework.
Stay in the loop, take heed of the business strategies mentioned below.
Strengthening of brands
Urban Company (UC), a managed marketplace that specifically provides beauty and home-related services such as spa, grooming, salon, yoga, and fitness, has been handling more than 50,000 service orders earlier this March 2020.
And with the rise of COVID-19, service orders went down to zero.
Considering the loss this company was going through, they launched “Mission Shakti” in an attempt to provide health and safety outlook to its customers, employees, and service partners. The company provided gloves, masks, eye goggles, and sanitizers to all their service partners. Besides this, they also made sure these service partners were given health insurance and income protection programs.
The company soon realized it could be difficult for people to decide availing services like salons and calling a stranger home for servicing. However, the latter service had lesser variables, that too if the services were made as safe as possible. Now UC introduced new SOPs and contactless services like sanitation and disinfection to cater to clients’ and customers’ needs.
The safety-related procedures were highly appreciated by the service partners and it reflected a dramatic spike of about 40 percent in the partner NPS scores ever since the crisis began.
Reimagining categories
A renowned brand called CultFit was launched in November 2016. Ever since it was launched, it grew at a rapid pace and turning out to be one of the largest health and fitness brands in India. Earlier in March, the brand had over 150 centers and nearly 80,000 users. Within a span of three years the company boomed, and had 7x growth in 2019 and was on the verge of growing 4-5x in 2020.
Unfortunately, the pandemic crisis started to completely disrupt the dynamics. Revenue generations went for a toss, offline operations went to a standstill since all the fitness centers had to be shut down. The amount that the company was making from the fitness business drastically went down to zero from USD 10M per month, that too overnight. The news is, the company had no clue when will the business be up and running. Due to the pandemic, the company is likely to have side-effects that may last for several quarters even after the lockdown gets lifted.
However, CultFit could quickly start online live video classes using the CultFit fitness app. Soon after users were able to join, the company took a toll and now serves over 5M customers. The company grew 6x within the first week of lockdown. Their business strategy worked, the reason why they were able to pivot quickly.
Rapid experiments
Swiggy, a company that was delivering food using an online app acted quickly toward the COVID-19 crisis. As concerns kept rising, the company introduced “zero contact deliveries.” Further on, to help customers place orders from safer restaurants they also introduced “best safety standards” badge to restaurants to minimize the spread of the virus. This included frequent sanitization, self-packing mechanisms, and temperature checks.
The company had grocery service support for over a year now and to match the customer needs grocery delivery services increased during the pandemic.
These are some of the business strategy frameworks used by companies to scale their businesses. Other strategies could include improvement of quantity or quality of acquisition to scale faster, unlocking new opportunities, and increase repeat usage of the product and help deliver upfront value to customers.
