WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

12/6/20

“It’s times like these you learn to live again, it’s times like these you learn to love again.”

Dave Grohl wrote Times Like These during a 3-month Foo Fighters’ hiatus in 2002. And it seems very apt right now, during our 3-month hiatus from welcoming and serving customers.

The hospitality industry, along with so many others, is going to have to learn to live again, to love again. And it will.

Society’s deep-rooted desire to provide one another with food, shelter and entertainment is as old as mankind itself.

As Charles Darwin so cleverly observed, those who survive are not the biggest, the strongest or the fastest - but those who are most able to adapt.

Perhaps not the first thought that comes to mind, but does our current state of affairs provide us with opportunity? The opportunity to find a new way forward; a more robust, more efficient, more sustainable and safer way.

As an agency, we aim to provide counsel to our clients, to help them shape their messages and discover a voice that will reach customers in the most genuine way possible. This is subtle yet powerful work that’s more important now than ever.

Can we see this time as an opportunity to relaunch our businesses? To reach out to both new and existing customers with a fresh feeling of connectedness.

Some of our current restaurant clients have launched home-delivery services which are proving successful. What we have witnessed is like a coming up for air after drowning in a sea of ‘temporarily closed’. Of course every business needs revenue to survive, but is that the only reason it exists? Despite the hardship the industry is facing we may be learning to place more value on time, on relationships, on provenance, on sustainability. Are we able to build these values into v2 of our industry? Do we have a choice?

Writing in The Guardian recently, Jonathan Nunn said: “To move forward, we must start by examining what we would like to save about the industry, giving space to the things that nourish us and our communities, and discarding what we believe doesn’t deserve to survive.”

Now is the time to ask fundamental questions about how restaurants do business and what it means to be one.

Can take-away offerings be embedded into a restaurant’s long term objective? 

Can restaurants now begin to examine their business model in order to make it more secure?

Jonathan Nunn puts it like this: “The restaurants that are the most adaptable will find their own solutions that focus on community and simplicity.”

Let’s embrace community and simplicity so we can ‘learn to live again’.

Now more than ever businesses need to adopt a PR strategy that honestly and empathetically values the customer and nurtures the relationships with them.