En esta ocasión, en este apartado de «Lider global» comparto y comento un artículo facilitado por un profesional experimentado y competente, que conozco desde hace unos años, con visión global, pragmática y estratégica. Me siento afortunado de poder compartir knowledge y sinergías con dicho directivo.
David Cabero Jounou es «General Manager Europe» de la multinacional BIC Group. Un lider natural top manager con amplia experiencia internacional. Cabe señalar, que siempre que puedo compartir con David unos momentos de su agenda apretada, salgo con un nuevo aprendizaje práctico y un nuevo reto y motivo para reflexionar.
Dicho artículo, que obviamente tiene el sello global, también estará publicado en la cuenta personal de Linkedin del directivo, al cual os recomiendo seguir en sus artículos, reflexiones y apariciones públicas :
https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-cabero-aa30671/
Usando un hilo conductor familiar nos conduce a una interesante reflexión sobre los cambios que se están produciendo y se van a producir en la nueva Era post-pandemia.
Pasamos pues, al artículo-post en cuestión en versión inglesa :
«If I could answer what COVID will change and what will not….
Saturday morning, I was taking breakfast with one if my two kids. As I was preparing my first coffee of the day, I got the first week-end request: “Will you buy me a bicycle, Dad?”
Later on that same day, while I was preparing my second coffee, I read an article in the Financial Times about how this new COVID world is completely changing the way people are buying cars.
Changes in consumer behavior are not easy to predict. And if someone gets it right, it is still more difficult to forecast for how long this trend will last. We are currently not travelling for holidays, using less public transport, eating mainly at home, shopping much more online and considering that cruises are somehow a leisure of the past!
The golden question is, once COVID is over, how many of these behaviors will stay? Which are the ones that will move from a short-term shift in consumption to become established as new consumer behavior with a long-lasting impact on our purchasing decisions?
Consumption is currently changing but I am afraid that we will go back to most of our old habits very soon. Two years of COViD may not be enough to change humankind even if some new trends like remote working will stay. When I move from macrotrends to microeconomy and specific sectors, some examples come to my mind: cars, bicycles and soda.
Car Dealers in the UK who were used to selling two or three used cars for every new vehicle that rolled off the lot saw the ratio increase to seven or eight. Data from the online car marketplace Auto Trader shows that used car prices increased by 7.6% in September vs the same period last year, the highest monthly increase on record and marking the fifth consecutive month of rising prices. The abiding reason for this is the wariness about using trains and busses, this increases demand of cars. A car is now a personal safe space. And more particularly the focus is used cars, these purchases are buoyed by employment uncertainties and the fact that buying a new car is a considerable investment for middle-class.
Younger people who were abundantly using ride-hailing apps before the pandemic, have now started to sign up for driving tests at a much higher rate. Red, the largest driving school in the UK, has seen online inquiries double, and course bookings over the past four weeks are 40 % higher than a year ago. These examples show how asymmetric are the impacts of COVID world across sectors, and also inside these sectors.
And these young people not just buying cars, they are also buying bicycles like my kid!
Whether these changes will become a short-term phenomenon, or a long-term trend matters to executives, private equity investors and company owners such as car dealers, driving schools and many more. Some private equity firms are buying bicycle plants around the world, which tends to make me think that probably some of these shifts are here to stay, or at least this is what they are betting on.
Other changes are only temporary, a great example is PepsiCo. The Pepsi company already recovered from the bar closures and confirmed a positive sales trend in 2020 despite COVID. Consumers are turning to Pepsi drinks and snacks as a safe value at home and progressively they have also started to return to bars and terraces across Europe in the third quarter pushed by sunny weather, holidays and a sense that COVID is maybe after all less lethal than we used to think. This might still change but snacks at home will continue to be eaten!
Needless to say that I am very willing to buy a bicycle for my kid, as this is a non-polluting solution, relatively safe in Barcelona with more than 100km of cycling lanes and rather cheap if you compare it to cars. The next decade will be a very interesting time for us. The world we knew will be destined to change! The keys to getting it right is having macroeconomic and behavioral perspective, but also deep knowledge of the microeconomics of the sector you are in. Those executives and investors that will rightly visualize the next big trends will have an important head start up to 2030!»
Reflexión de futuro basada en tendencias y distintos indicadores sin olvidar la visión de los inversores y otros stakeholders.
Aparecen ejemplos de targets, sectores y de marcas referentes, espejo de aprendizaje y de benchmarking.
Sólo nos queda esperar el tiempo que se comenta para ver si dichas tendencias se cumplen y también nos quedaría deslumbrar la pequeña duda, si la bicicleta comprada al final, siguiendo las tendencias en crecimiento en smart cities, será eléctrica..
Seguimos avanzando en el knowledge-compartido.
