We’ve all visited someplace where a tour guide pointed to a line on a building to show how high the flood waters got during some historic storm. The marks on the wall help us calibrate how much trouble they were in and how heroic their recovery was.

After the coronavirus pandemic finally ends, all vaccinated, we will have many sad metrics – the number of deaths caused by the virus, the number of days we were sheltering-at-home, the number of missed graduations and cancelled sporting events, and assuming there is adequate testing, the number of people who survived a case of Covid-19. There are macro-economic numbers we will also know – peak unemployment, the decrease in GDP, the dollar value of the government stimulus effort, and the percent change in the S&P 500. What we won’t know is exactly how high the water from this invisible flood got at our house or our business.

Our social media footprints help memorialize how our lives changed during the pandemic. Despite never leaving home, our calendars are dotted with the normal and unusual events that have punctuated the weeks at home – Zoom links and banana bread recipes.

My colleagues at Lab42 have helped me realize that our businesses need to measure their status during the pandemic, too. It’s easy to put your head down, do the difficult work that remains, ideally build some new skills, and wait for the first signs of recovery. That is not enough. We need to know how high the flood water is, so we can tell the stories of the hardship we endured, and more importantly so we can fully understand and accelerate the recovery.

A company that halts research during the pandemic will not know if their early recovery results are a huge improvement over the depths they plumbed or a slow climb back up. Comparing recovery period results to prior “normal” numbers will not give decision makers the information they need to move forward in a changing economy. 

We need to pay attention now to what we are going to want to know afterwards. So we need to think about the “during the pandemic” research we should be doing now. 

• How are consumers prioritizing their budgets?

• Is brand loyalty a casualty of the pandemic?

• Are customers moving to value brands?

• What new habits are customers forming?

• What messages are customers ready to accept?

Research has always been used to understand the ‘who’s, what’s, when’s, where’s and why’s’ and that is more important than ever. Let’s work on this together. How about scheduling a Zoom meeting?