“Hunker Down.”
That’s the latest direction for coping with the pandemic from Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Everything is cancelled.
Or at least it sure seems that way. Every time I turn on the news or check my social feed, there is another school district that has reversed course and opting for all remote learning. My Chicago Bears decided to play to an empty stadium. College football is pretty much cancelled, and dozens of other sports teams and leagues have opted to move their seasons to spring. Every day a new university that had planned to open is instead, in an abundance of caution, sending students home before they even had time to unpack all their cool new stuff from Bed, Bath & Beyond.
I imagine for many of you, your dinner table conversation, like mine, has been dominated by the question of the day — will there be school or not?
To be clear, I have no clue. But what I do know is that the “back to school” experience is a national shared experience — a mindset — as much as it is an actual activity. And as you will read below, it has also become big business.
If the first few months of the pandemic and lockdown were marked by anything, for me it felt like they were marked by a relatively universal acceptance (if not embrace) of the need to “do the right thing” for our neighbors, our family, our friends, America.
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You are used to seeing my essay address the challenges and opportunities faced by brands during the Pandemic.
Not today.
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“Meet your customer where they are.” I think as marketers we have all heard and seen that enough to be believers, but that begs a much trickier question, which is, can someone please tell me where that is? And can you assure me that “where” they are today will stick around long enough to adapt my marketing strategy or to completely change up my product offering?
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As we are entering our third monthly flip of the calendar in this #StayHome era, I am sure I am not alone in looking for any silver linings that I can find. For me, there have been a handful of such silver linings.
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I am writing this, as I have been doing for seemingly a very long time now, while “working from home.” Only today, because it is one of those rare and must-be-celebrated beautiful spring days, I am writing from our patio. I can’t help but shake an eerie feeling of déjà vu — the skies look identical to what they looked like on the afternoon of 9/11. Beautiful and bright — and no planes overhead. It is an eerie and painful reminder of another dark time for all of us.
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For me one of the “silver linings” of this COVID-19 crisis was the uniting feeling of “we are all in this together.” Obviously, we all experience it differently, and for some of us those experiences are far more difficult than for others, but for all of us there has definitely been a heightened sense of citizenship, of community, of shared sacrifice for the greater good.
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think for many of us, the hard truth has sunk in that we are all going to be in this new reality — and deep into it — for quite some time. I haven’t lost my belief that there will be an “other side” (I recently wrote about that on LinkedIn, but the length of time that we are going to be unsure is most certainly going to test us in ways we’ve never been tested before.
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Our so-called new normal has been, and still is, quite the shock to just about every facet of human life. No conversation about this issue can start with anything but an acknowledgment of the personal impact to each and every one of us.
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