While the country continues to be in self-quarantining, the economy makes an effort to come back to normalcy.
Medianews4u reached out to experts to understand how this has affected the businesses and the solutions to this global menace.
Kunal Vora, Founder, ABND
Like all industries, the Branding industry too is bearing the brunt of this concerning pandemic. Events have been canceled, brand launches postponed and field-research is at a standstill. Employee and client safety is our utmost priority. Hence, we have shifted to a Work from Home model where digitalization has acted as a pure boon. It is crucial that businesses make astute use of digital tools wherever possible to minimize losses. We are working closely with each of our clients to ensure that we prioritize whatever we have committed.
Platforms such as Zoom, Skype, Slack, WhatsApp, WeTransfer, etc. are being utilized to carry out day to day tasks, meetings, and other operations, to maintain workflow and meet deadlines. We are also making the best use of this downtime to educate and help our clients evaluate their brands by conducting brand audits and assessing their existing brand assets, communication, and strategy. This will give us the opportunity to come up with a fresh new brand strategy ideas that will, in turn, help them strongly connect with their audience.
Pradeep Kumaar, CEO Neil Patel Digital
Sr Management along with the HR’s should encourage the team members to work from home, we have implemented work from home this week and requested the team to avoid travel. We have also avoided face to face meetings with clients for the time being and the preferred mode of communication is Skype. This ensures the safety of our employees which our priority. The week prior, we had encouraged our employees to use private transport and avoid public transport, we reimbursed their travel expenses the same day.
Our office was stacked up with sanitizers. Though this is not an enduring solution, our teams communicate constantly and keep posted on the happenings. We trust our team and they have always met their deadlines be it work from home or office. We have never compromised on quality. Corona has impacted every industry, sadly this situation will continue for a while and business will struggle. Now from a digital marketing and SEO standpoint, we have witnessed a steep decline in organic traffic for most industries, we cater to different sectors through our agency. We have witnessed a huge dip in conversions which had a big traffic boom. We haven’t seen a huge difference in pay per clicks, costs haven’t come down as much, that said our team is putting in the extra yards to ensure we have minimal impact and hopefully, the corona effect will fade away soon.
Neha Kulwal, Country Manager, Admitad India
Corona Virus’ impact on our business and industry has been mixed so far in the past two months. While online sales in the categories of Travel and Goods from China have markedly dropped recently (around 45% dip), we have seen an upsurge in sales in the categories of pharmacy, hypermarkets, and insurances. Last month, there was an increase of 76% in the sales of items in pharmacy due to unprecedented demand for hand sanitizers, masks and cleaning agents.
Hypermarkets showed a rise of 20% in sales and financial(health & term insurances) categories marked a rise of about 40%. Travel, electronics goods (mobile phones), apparel and shoes, furniture & household and phone offer categories are showing big downturns ranging from 50% to 90% drop. With office employees increasingly working out of their homes for the past two weeks, the only space that is connecting individuals and businesses these days is the internet, owing to the adoption of social distancing as a precautionary measure world-wide. It is expected that this will lead to more demand in the categories of hypermarkets, pharmacy and finance &health and term insurance.
Dr. Jagdish Chaturvedi – ENT Surgeon, Medical Device Innovator, Author and Stand-up Comedian
Every industry has been impacted by COVID19. We doctors are trying to guide patients in the right direction through telephonic calls and meeting them in hospitals while maintaining adequate precautions through masks, hand hygiene and keeping a safe distance. However, meeting the patients and treating them in hospitals have been limited by hospitals to a large extent in the best interest of patients. But emergency cases and critical illnesses are been treated in hospitals without any delay. The impact for me as a stand-up comedian is that for over the last three weeks, all the stand-up comedy shows we had have been canceled and the ones that were lined-up till mid of April, have also been canceled. I completely support this to avoid crowd gathering and to support social distancing. Thanks to social media platforms as it allows me to release videos on COVID19 with a sense of entertainment along with information.
