#BocconiCorrespondents. From Berlin, Marco Esposito

Hi, my name is Marco, and right after graduating in Marketing Management at Bocconi in March 2012 I moved to Berlin to start my career in the digital environment.

We started the lock down in the middle of March and Berliners reacted to the new situation by developing a strong sense of community. They are trying to support local businesses as much as possible, ordering or picking up products from the shops near to them in the neighborhood rather than from the big supermarkets.

I really like to see how restaurants are reinventing themselves on a daily basis, changing the menus and offering special delivery or take away services. The result is that people can still enjoy their favorite food while at the same time helping their favorite restaurants to survive.

When the corona virus emergency started I was working on the organization of a music festival in Tuscany and I was starting an experiential marketing agency to help brands create customized and measurable interactions with their audiences within an event. I was shocked by the idea that I had to give up on these plans.

Together with my team we decided to adjust our value proposition to an online scenario and we're now about to launch an interactive platform through which brands can communicate while people are enjoying an educational and entertaining experience.

Overall in Berlin we are very lucky! We can still have walks in the parks and we can do sports outside; we are still allowed to meet in groups of two people maintaining the social distance.

Angela Merkel, the minister of health and the head of the epidemiology institute are the only ones who release official communications and I think this helps to control confusion in terms of information.

At the beginning, also in Germany people underestimated the issue but now in Berlin we all notice a change in general behavior.

I am personally curious to see what is going to happen next, I think it is important for different realities to start dealing with "a new now" and be fast to adapt to it. We won't go back to normal, because normality was the problem and we all know that.
I think it's a good opportunity to reinvent things, including the economic and social dynamics that lie ahead.