Who buys 11% of their alcohol online during lockdown, and what would a Likert scale say about it?

Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Speak PR Podcast. My name is Jim James and I'm your host. I'd like to share with you thoughts and tips about getting you and your company noticed. This morning, I was on an action coach call with a group of business owners here. And the question was turning to getting the staff back to work, but also how to start to greet customers. As in the last week or so, people have been coaxing their staff out of, out of the homes and starting to get them ready to go back into the office or the factory or the shop. Now the next task of companies is to start thinking about communicating with existing and potential customers. The stories that were shared included one about a dentist. One dentist had actually done nothing during the coronavirus lockdown, and whilst one of the participants in the call had had a dental appointment, there had been no call to actually physically cancel the appointment, nor any follow-up to reschedule. Another person on the call had the opposite experience where their dentist had rung them And explained when the practice would be open again and what could be done to catch up really with their dental care. And it raised in a very simple way how different companies have reached out to their customers, existing and reaching out potentially to new customers. And the question turned to whether you should ring all of your customers and find out how they're doing. Well, The issue with that, of course, is that that's just not really practical for many people, especially people in retail that have a large number of customers or walk-in customers for which they maybe not have any engagement or ongoing relationship. This is very, very difficult. So I suggested that one way that people could start to get a barometer on the wellbeing and the attitude of their customers is to start to use polling. And how does polling impact PR? Well, because without knowing how people are feeling and what they're thinking, the message that we're about to give may more likely fall on deaf or not hearing ears. As I've talked about before with the Wio's Law from the famous Finnish professor, whatever can be misunderstood will be misunderstood. And the way of reducing the chance for being misunderstood is really to take a temperature check and find out what people are thinking before they come into contact with you. So polls can be placed either in-store, point of sale. In Singapore, where I travel and live a lot, they actually have a touchscreen where you can give a rating for the For the cleanliness of the restrooms, for example, at the airport. At the airport in Beijing, the counter with the passports has a like/dislike button on it as well, so you can rate the customs officer. You always have to be careful not to rate them, uh, not like until you've got your stamp. So polls like these can take place in store, or you can have them online using platforms like SurveyMonkey or PollDaddy. And there is a new one that's come to my attention called Mentimeter, which enables you to embed a polling system and a word cloud actually into your presentation. So that if you are having a presentation on Zoom, for example, or Microsoft Teams, you can actually upload the PowerPoint to Mentimeter and plug in some polls to that, and as you're displaying it, you can ask everybody with you to give their feedback. Polls can also be used in LinkedIn as a new feature, as we've covered on one of our blog posts recently, and it can also be inserted into Facebook where you can create polls as well. So there are many tools, both structured and unstructured, for doing polling. And these come back to, a lot of them, back to the science created by a chap called Likert. And this was an American social scientist called Rensis Likert who invented this bipolar scale all the way back in 1932, you know, some 90 years ago. So we're still living on the, on the technology invented by someone a great deal pre-digital times. Now, the Likert scale assumes that there's a strength of intensity of an attitude that is linear from, you know, liking to disliking and, and somewhere along the line in between. So it allows for quantitative data to be collected about an emotional issue. Now, that can be very powerful because We can start to take temperature tests about how people feel about any number of issues that we're facing. Now, we've been talking about the reluctance of people to go back to work, and there was a survey done just recently by a company in America called Vitovio, and they found that 25% of all people would— of all workers would leave their job if the workplace didn't make stronger investments in cleanliness. So as business owners, we're thinking about how we get people to work and how to service our customers, and we're possibly thinking about relatively superficial amounts of information that we're giving to our staff. But implementing a social distancing policy, investing in smarter cleaning methods, and communicating and educating workers on healthy habits will be 3 key parts of both getting back to work for our teams but also for our consumers. Now, a UK-based video meetings company called StarLeaf did a survey as well, as people are now figuring out surveys are the best way to also create media coverage. This Starleaf survey reveals that 57% of people working from home due to the corona outbreak are quite happy to wait at least a month after the lockdown before returning to their office. And this was just, uh, on May 7th this was done. Now obviously from next week onwards we have people going back to work, and from May 8th we have the beginning to school So there's a time lag between when we're open for work and for education and so on, and when people actually feel comfortable going back to work. Now we have listeners to the Speak PR podcast all the way over in Singapore and Malaysia, so very happy to hear that. And so for those listeners, In Singapore, a survey done by Job Central of nearly 3,500 employees found that 20% of the employees surveyed admitted to faking an illness so they could get an MC, which stands for medical certificate. Now, a medical certificate in Singapore gives you the entitlement to take a day off, and if I recall, A company can't really quiz that up to a certain number. So a member of staff can get an MC, and the company has to give them a paid day without more than the medical note. Now, if we take this 20%, how many of them are thinking at the moment I'm being asked to go back to work before I'm really ready? Last year, the number of people who took MCs in Singapore admittedly or. Under admission was only about 2.5 days per year. So it's not egregious. It may be just tacking on an extra day for a long weekend, but that still represents possibly an area where Singapore employees and those that can use this ploy in other countries might start to turn to the MC as a policy instead of just saying no to their employees and employers. Now, if we turn our attention to France, which is also where we have some listeners for this podcast, and bonjour, the Gallup survey conducted just in April this year, so very, very recently, found that over one-third of French workers, 36%, agree that their employer has communicated a clear plan of action and that they're informed about the state of the company. Is only 36%. In other words, 2/3 of French workers feel uninformed about the state of the company and the clear plan of action post-COVID. And only 1/3 feel confident that their company's health policies will keep them safe. Now, that's massive. If 2/3 of the employees in France feel as though they are unsafe, then why would they go back to work? And the French and the Dutch employees were the ones surveyed that felt that they had the greatest sense of employee stability, i.e., that they could say whether they did or did not want to go to work without threat of retaliation by the company. Now interestingly, in France, only 39% of the French managers felt that their immediate superior kept them informed about what's going on. In other words, Over half of all French management believe that their senior management didn't tell them what was going on. So the Gallup poll is showing here that in France, as one example, nearly only a third of people believe that they're going to be safe when they go back to work and feel also that they don't have to. Because they have enough rights not to go back to work. But then let's look at the other side of the equation. A survey just recently in America showed that 60% of all shoppers are fearful of shopping inside of grocery stores. This survey found that shoppers in America have reduced their visiting of stores from 2.5 times a week to just once a week. So, you know, less than half. And if I think about my own habits, we used to go 2 or 3 times on the way back from school. Now we, we really make one necessary journey. So consumers are apparently feeling, according to a survey in Forbes, that they're caught between a double-axis crisis between health and finances. There were some 13 countries surveyed by Deloitte, and it showed that 42% of all the respondents across these 13 different countries, which included places like China and India and France and the Netherlands and UK and America, and South Korea. On the 13-country survey, 42% worry about job loss, okay, led by the people in Spain where my good friend Keith is holed up at the moment, has been for what must be months now. In India, 54% of people were afraid of job loss, and South Korea, 51%. So we've got a lot of people who are both nervous about going back to work but are also worried about their finances. So the, the French and the Dutch, as I say, felt that they were the most secure, but they're also the least worried about making their upcoming payments. And the Japanese, actually, who are notorious for saving, were the least worried about meeting their requirements. But the average consumer responses across the survey, 35%, and only 35% said they felt safe going back to stores. 25% felt that they feel safe staying in a hotel, and only 22% feel they feel they're safe getting back on an aeroplane. So that's a massive number if you run a hotel. Or any kind of accommodation business, that 75% of people across these 13 countries do not trust going back into your accommodation. And of course, if you're running an airline, nearly 80% of people feel that it's unsafe to get in a tin can in the sky, let alone the holding area that you have to wait in before you get on an aeroplane. So we're going to see some amazing shifts then, of course, that what we're going to have to be looking at in PR is more than just a short-term need to reassure our customers that it's safe to go back in our store, but that it's also okay for our staff. But we're also going to have to work from a PR point of view on the communication not just one-to-one but through the different layers of management. Because if you run a big company or even a mid-sized one and you have different layers of management, inculcating and sharing the messaging across the different tiers is going to be essential, which is why we have on our website under the Speak PR module the Message Home, which has got The key message that you want to communicate, and then the three supporting messages. I suggested that all PR now should be what I call through a COVID mindset: should be compassionate, optimistic, values-based, informative, and digital. And I was kind of heartened to see that in the in the Forbes and Digital report from Deloitte, they also talk about the need to be digital and about the importance of being optimistic, but also the importance of being informative. So we have now a situation where, from a PR point of view, we're running companies— you're running companies where your staff feel, by and large, statistically, They're not ready to go back to work and quite happily spend almost another month waiting to go back to work. You have consumers that are saying that they don't want to go back into the store or into the airport or into the hotel. So a big part of our job is to bridge the divide, is to draw those people back out into the workforce and to reassure and coax those consumers and customers back into the into the marketplace. Of course, where people are shopping is online, and this Deloitte report also shows that it's really millennials leading the online shift to mostly in-store categories. And my 12-year-old daughter is having a field day right now with deliveries from, from Amazon. because she has her own account and she has her own bank account and she's loving it. Now, but all age groups are doing more shopping online. But interestingly, the young are buying more product online across all categories included in the survey: groceries, alcohol, everyday household goods, and medicine. But the middle-aged are now buying 25% of their medicines online, and the over-55s are buying 30% of all their medicines online. But for the older people above, above 55— I'm not quite there yet— whilst they're buying 30% of their medicines online, they've said that they're only going to buy 11% of their alcohol online. They're obviously seeing that they're either finishing off their wine cellars or going to the wine shop is still part of an essential purchase and a necessary part of their, of their daily lives. So some things are changing, but some things are going to stay the same. So as you get ready to coax your staff out of their furlough position and to encourage customers to come back and to be feeling safe in your workplace or your factory or your restaurant or wherever it is, think about how you can be compassionate, optimistic, values-based, informative, and digital. And I hope you can use a survey to find out where they're at and how you're doing. Hope this talk about getting metrics to your marketing has been useful. My name is Jim James. Thank you for joining me. I pray that your business is profitable, that your health stays safe, and that you keep on communicating. Thank you so much for joining me today.