Think Like a Virus

5 Growth Lessons Businesses Can Learn from the Coronavirus

If one thing had a roaring 2020, it was SARS-CoV-2, more commonly known as Coronavirus. All of us were affected by it and millions of lives were devastated, as it endangered our way of living, our livelihoods and even life itself.

I am a consultant and typically not a week goes by without me flying to another country. Now, sitting in lockdown conditions without any travel for almost a year, I felt like a fish out of water. While I also wish Corona had never happened, I couldn’t help but notice more and more parallels between the mechanics of this virus and my day-to-day work in helping B2C and B2B companies grow.

Here are 5 things I believe businesses can learn from the Coronavirus:

1. Infection sources: What a nose and mouth is to a virus, are different channels to your business — learn how to make them more infectious.
2. Incubation period: Learn how to incubate your prospects to customers and to highly satisfied users who start referring your product.
3. Basic reproduction number R0: Understand how to apply the reproduction factor R to your product to drive exponential growth.
4. Superspreading: Identify superspreading behavior in your employees and use it to your advantage. Turn your events into superspreading events.
5. Mutations: A virus is constantly mutating to improve all of the above. Mutate your product and actions and promote winning mutations.

1. Infection sources

Infecting is already the first activity the Coronavirus excels at. Unlike other infectious diseases like HIV, which require direct contact with body fluids such as blood, Coronavirus’ main method of transmission is through inhaled droplets generated from an infected person’s cough, sneeze or speech. Also, infections can happen by touching a contaminated surface, allowing the coronavirus to piggyback on two unavoidable daily activities: breathing and touching. An analysis by ElPaís describes how this plays out: if a group of 6 people spends 4 hours in a closed room, one infected person will infect all other five.

As a business this means in order to capture the most clients, you need to properly set up your sales and service channels. What a nose or mouth is to a virus, a Website, App, WeChat account, Call-Center or Retail Store is to your product or service:

1. Maximize the avenues to your customers: Where do they spend their time? Are you present there? Is your product visible and buyable to them? A good example is to pay attention to what your customers actually see when they are on your online channels, measured in a KPI called “viewability”. Good practice is to rigorously optimize viewability (together with other factors such as choosing the right headline, visuals, packaging, pricing, etc.) — this Google study includes some handy tips, e.g. that the best place to put a “call-to-action” on your website is actually right “above the fold” (the fold being the bottom border of any screen after which a user is forced to start scrolling)
2. Optimize “infectiousness” of your channels: Similarly like a virus chooses the path of least resistance, companies apply human-centric design to optimize their customer experience. Using behavioral customer research methods such as ‘walk-a-mile’, designers put themselves into the customers’ shoes, identify ‘friction’ and adjust the customer journey accordingly. One of the most literal examples for this is Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas who followed students’ footfalls on a green field and modeled the plan for the Illinois Institute of Technology after it.

Left: a “desire path” created by the footfall of countless pedestrians; Right: Blueprint of the Chicago IIT student campus, modeled after students’ desire paths (Credit: Rem Koolhaas)

2. Incubation period

The incubation period is the “timeframe between exposure to the virus and the onset of first symptoms” which in case of Covid-19 is “on average 5–6 days, but can be up to 14 days”, according to the WHO.

Now comes the tricky part, which in my opinion is THE biggest secret of Coronavirus’ fast spread: most people infect other people actually BEFORE those 5–6 days have passed, meaning when they are still “asymptomatic”, as a study of the Big Data Institute at Oxford University reveals: 77% of all transmissions are strictly pre-symptomatic or early symptomatic.

Chart A: black peak shows highest probability of transmission with less than 5 days after infection. Chart B: shows that in most scenarios peak transmission happens BEFORE onset of symptoms (Credit: Big Data Institute/University of Oxford)

Applied to a business context, incubation time can be compared to the time between entering the purchasing journey and reaching highly satisfied usage. Highly satisfied customers are significantly more likely to recommend the product to their friends/acquaintances, as this medium post by AirBnB suggests. Also, the most likely period for a customer to actually purchase a second or third product (in other words: cross-selling) is immediately after becoming a customer. According to a publication by Pitney Bowes, “75% of all cross-selling opportunities occur within the first 90 days”, meaning you need to make most out of this “incubation time”:

1. Measure your customers’ incubation time by understanding what “highly satisfied usage” means and how long it takes your customers to reach it from the time they start the purchasing journey. Start by analyzing highly effective and satisfied customers: how many and which products do they buy? Do they use them? If so, how do they get the most out of them? Are they reaching “customer success” goals? Are they using other offerings such as Customer Service Apps, Tutorials, etc.?
2. Reduce the time to usage and especially to highly satisfied usage: Are there roadblocks to actually start using the product, like the need for a home-visit of a technician? Can you get rid of a cumbersome back and forth by prepopulating options and streamlining the process? From that point on, how can you accelerate the time to “highly satisfied usage”? How do you help your customers become successful with your product?
3. Help your customers become “infectious” early on. Establish quick and easy ways for your customers to rate your product and share their buying and product experience on Social Media. Obviously make sure you send the referral request only once the customer had the chance to use the product.

3. Basic reproduction number R0

The basic reproduction number, or R0 describes how many other people one infected person will infect with a virus on average. It is the “default” infection rate of a virus when released in an environment where everybody is susceptible to an infection. See this NYtimes article for a comparison of R0 of different infectious diseases.

SARS-CoV-19’s basic reproduction number ranges between 2–4, meaning that on average an infected person will infect 2–4 others in the absence of dedicated measures. Compared to highly contagious diseases such as measles (R0=15) this might seem like a low number, but look at seasonal flu (R0=1.3) and you understand why this virus should not be underestimated.

The good news is that one does not have to accept this R-factor as it is, but you can influence it, as the world has done in various ways, be it by wearing masks, observing social distancing norms or resorting to the “hammer”, meaning lockdowns/shelter-in-place regulations. This animation nicely shows how measures can reduce the R-factor:

Animation showing how the Coronavirus spreads exponentially without any measures, and how measures can reduce the R-factor (Credit: siouxsiew, xtotl thespinoff.co.nz)

As you can see, as soon as the R-factor is above 1.0, you enter an exponential growth curve — therefore the goal of all measures is to move R to <1.0, which inevitably leads to a slowdown and ultimately standstill of infections.

Now when applying these concepts to business, one needs to reverse this logic:

1. Increase the R0 of your product. Part of the reason Coronavirus’ “default” reproduction number of 2–4 is higher than seasonal flu’s 1.3 stems from “product features” of its viral structure and its “ability to stay longer in the air” (Henry Ford LiveWell). Invest in your product and make sure it delivers an excellent onboarding, usage and referral experience.
2. Establish the R-factor as a core metric. How many new customers are being referred by one existing customer? How many new leads are generated out of one sales meeting? How many referrals does one sales employee generate? How many add-on products are added by an additional purchase?
3. Apply measures that increase the R-factor. Leverage your happy customers to introduce you to their network and promote your service/product. Think about how to incentivize such behavior, e.g. through referral programs. Build follow-on opportunities into any conversation. The simplest form of this is your local mom & pop bodega asking “is there anything else I can offer you?”

4. Superspreading

Now while tracking the R-factor gives you a good grasp at the overall picture, it masks a nasty truth: only 10% of infected individuals cause 80% of new cases, as Dr. Liji Thomas, MD elaborates. We call those individuals “superspreaders”.

While the reasons behind why some people become superspreaders remain opaque, signs point to a mix of external factors, such as the activities of a person (e.g. being a bus driver, flight attendant, or other highly social activity) and internal factors (e.g. the viral load a person develops and carries or a tendency towards asymptomatic infections).

The concept of superspreading can also be applied to events. A tragic example of this mechanic occured in South Korea in early 2020. One church service alone led to over 3,900 secondary cases, as the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine at Oxford University describes. Commonalities in these superspreading events are typically indoor gatherings of many people, insufficient physical distancing, no use of masks/no FFP2 masks, no ventilation and loud speaking/singing, combined with not enough testing.

Similar mechanisms can be leveraged in a business context:

1. Detect your superspreaders. Look out for these “10% of people that drive 80% of outcomes” dynamics. Typical roles this can apply to are sales managers, store employees, call-center agents or influencers—important metrics to identify them could be number of leads, conversion rate, value per transaction, but also negative outcomes such as cancellation rates or churn.
2. Use them to your advantage. Start driving outcomes by using classifications to drive high-value customers to high-performing sales reps and devising on-the-job training to move people “up the ladder”. Establish automated best-practice sharing from these superspreaders to the rest, e.g. by sharing the scripts/methods they apply. Also, give them the tools to become more contagious — a great example is Amazon’s referral program, which incentivizes third parties to include links to Amazon on their blogs in return of a commission. In a virtuous circle, these millions of links boost Amazon’s organic position on search engines.
3. Turn your events into superspreading events. For meetings, maximize the number of potential customers you reach with your message, e.g. by leveraging digital platforms, which allow “pooling of customers” for demos, or establishing roundtables. Give a stage to key customers so they also promote the event and prepare handy content they can then share afterwards with their social network.

5. Mutations

Like any other virus, the Coronavirus also mutates. As it relies on human cells to produce millions of copies of itself, mutations can be compared to “copy mistakes” when copying a text (see this article by The Conversation). In the same way that a text consists of words and letters, a virus’ RNA (text) consists of domains (words) and nucleotides (letters). The Coronavirus RNA is 30,000 nucleotides long. Most mutations either don’t propagate or affect non-essential domains. Also, the Coronavirus’ mutation rate of two nucleotide substitutions — or two changed letters — per month is comparably low. It is half the mutation rate of the seasonal flu and a quarter of HIV’s mutation rate, see Nature, 2020.

However, every once in a while a mutation can have an impact on the efficacy of a virus, e.g. when the receptor binding domain, responsible for the “spike protein”, is affected. Exactly this happened in a variant called B.1.1.7, which was associated with unusually high transmission rates in the United Kingdom starting in October 2020.

When taking a closer look at variant B.1.1.7, Nextstrain/ECDC scientists found an unusually high amount of mutations in the receptor binding domain, illustrated by the N501Y location within that domain (see black box in the below chart).

The below “phylogenetic tree diagram” shows how the original Wuhan strain (bottom left) evolved across multiple branches, with B.1.1.7 ending up in the black box (top right) — with unusually many mutations of this bespoke N501Y location. One possible explanation for this high amount of mutations could be a prolonged infection in a single patient, as this can lead to “escape mutations”.

Phylogenetic tree of mutations of the N501Y location in the receptor binding domain, colored by countries, UK in orange (Credit: Hodcroft E., Neher R., Nextstrain, cited in European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control 2020)

Initial analysis (Volz, E. et al, 2021) reveal that this B.1.1.7 variant is 74% more transmissive. In other words, the virus self-optimized two out of five of our elements:#3 (R-factor) and #4 (Superspreading).

How to put this to use:

1. Start mutating your product and your actions and promote positive mutations. Pick “domains” of your product, your customer journey, your sales scripts, your offering and create different “mutations” of it, and test them against each other and against a “control group”. Continue using the winners and make them the new “control group” which needs to be beaten.
2. Produce “good” data — and a lot of it. Many companies mistake A-B-tests with statistically sound experiments. Avoid biases in the selection of test and control groups, ensure the results are measured on an action or customer level and that they are machine-readable. When in doubt — involve a data scientist early on, otherwise you might jump to wrong conclusions, e.g. like the “cardinal’s life expectancy fallacy” in this video by Salvatore Cali.
3. Shorten the feedback cycle. An interesting explanation why the gaming industry has always been one of the most innovative industries is that game developers are passionate gamers themselves. Therefore, they can act upon feedback immediately. In larger organizations this requires “connecting producers of AI with consumers of AI” as this joint MIT and BCG study suggests. Also, establish data pipelines feeding your models automatically and as close to real-time as possible.

In a nutshell

To think like a virus, ask yourself these 5 questions:

1. Have I optimized my “infection sources”? Is it easy for customers to see and purchase my product or service?
2. How do I ensure a short “incubation time” between purchase and highly satisfied usage, so that my customers quickly become “infectious” advocates of my product/service?
3. What is my “R-factor” per customer, per meeting, per event? How do I build effective ways to get follow-on leads out of every opportunity?
4. Who are my “superspreaders”? Do I help them thrive? How do I eliminate superspreaders of negative outcomes? Have I thought about how to turn every event into a superspreading event?
5. How fast is my “mutation rate”? Have I established an automated “feedback loop” which optimizes all of the above aspects continuously?

By applying these 5 elements, organizations can unlock viral growth, create better customer experiences and increase the productivity of their employees. And as a result, spread better ideas, products and services to a world in which Corona hopefully soon is nothing more than a distant memory for all of us.

Disclaimer: I am not a medical expert and don’t claim to be one. This article focuses on business strategy and I would not recommend using medical terms when talking marketing strategy. In case of questions/feedback, please comment/DM.

Sources: ElPaís (2020); Google (2014); The Guardian (2018); National Institutes of Health (2020); World Health Organization (2020); Big Data Institute at Oxford University (2020); Pitney Bowes (2010); The New York Times (2020); The Spinoff (2020); Henry Ford LiveWell (2020); News Medical (2020); Centre for Evidence-based Medicine at Oxford University (2020); The Conversation (2020); Nature (2020); Volz, E. et al (2021); Salvatore Cali (2021); MITSloan Management Review (2019)