Business Beware: Consumers Judging How You Handle Global Health Crisis

There are many views about how a person is measured. Plato believed what a person does with power is how you measure her.

For Goethe, the measure of a person was how he/she treats someone who can do absolutely nothing for him/her.

President Joe Biden’s take is that the measure of a person isn’t just the road she’s traveled, “but the choices made along the way.”
MLK and Crisis
A crisis-oriented view comes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who said, “The true measure of a man is not how he behaves in moments of comfort and convenience but how he stands at times of controversy and challenges.”

Companies are collections of people. So, one way to judge them is how they measure up during challenges, or a crisis. A Salesforce survey of 12,000 global consumers and 3,600 B2B buyers provides evidence.

Polling people during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the survey found 90 percent say how a company acts during a crisis demonstrates its trustworthiness.

Moreover, 89 percent of customers expect companies to state their values clearly, and 90 percent expect them to walk the talk.