With the partial lifting of social distancing and more shops re-opening, a brand that is silent at the moment may be perceived as a struggling brand – especially if they were a brand that was very much in the public eye via all kinds of advertising and/or social campaigns before.
Some of the higher profile brands have transcended just the need to sell a product but have actually played a significant role in society in the last 3 months – be that via empathy, problem-solving, partnership with their consumer or even with humour. For sure, companies and brands that have been sympathetic, attentive and understanding of their customers will rate highly in people’s minds. It is difficult to evaluate in the short-term the power of loyalty and customer retention but post-crisis the rewards will be there for those brands who were sympathetic towards their customers’ fears and hopes for the future.
There is one certainty of this crisis and that is that some companies will fall by the wayside – with recession looming and people more careful (and better informed) than ever of how they spend their disposable income. Of course the other side of the coin is that those companies and brands who have earned a deep sense of loyalty will come out of the pandemic in a much better position than when they came in – especially those who can track digitally their most loyal audience and reward that loyalty.
People will remember brands for their acts of good in a time of crisis, particularly if done with real heart and generosity. This could take the form of donating to food banks, providing free products for medical personnel, or continuing to pay employees while the company’s doors are closed. In terms of media communications, feel-good content that alleviates anxiety and promotes positive messaging will go a long way to enhancing the brand. However, companies need to show that their contributions are material and not solely for commercial benefit. Consumers recognize authenticity and true purpose.
Of course there is no rigid framework for marketing and presenting your brand at the moment, it is as moveable and changeable as the pandemic itself – ups and downs, gains and setbacks – but just as people have become used to new ways of working, deploying collaboration technologies that can provide chat, file sharing, meeting and call capabilities, teams can stay connected and remain productive and aware of shifts in consumer perceptions and expectations. This sort of working will continue long past the phases of this pandemic.
However advertising and brand building during this crisis is no easy task – it can be a minefield (you only need to look at the Pepsi Co’s advert accused of trivialising the Black Lives Matter movement). Revenues from advertising have fallen by an estimated 75% across all media: many brands have chosen to withdraw from advertising altogether but this is certainly the time to explore new options. Witness the growth of TikTok, a short-term mobile engagement forum, which runs on a content graph (rather than social) – an open platform where anyone can be discovered, the flow of contact not slowed or obstructed by invitation-only groups or the need for followers.
Quality, premium publishers are also experiencing inevitable drops in demand from advertisers scaling back their budgets, and this is being compounded by keyword blocking and a general aversion to advertising against news and Covid-related stories. So while consumers are actively searching for this content (and generally have more time on their hands to do so), brands are avoiding it, and it is threatening the ad-funded model for widely available, high-quality journalism. And when brands are not advertising against news, they may be doing so on social media but we would argue that social media and brand ‘safety’ do not simply go hand in hand.
With ‘fake news’ around coronavirus certainly being a problem it is generally shared on social platforms through user-generated content. An about turn is being experienced now as consumers are flocking to trusted sources of journalism and that is where advertising budgets would best be spent – there is an association of trust that is hard to replicate on many social platforms.
Can we look forward to a whole new wave of ‘compassionate’ advertising? Well it is a trend that may be here to stay – a host of brands have aligned them to empathy-led marketing (and away from action-orientated methods) and it is clear that many will continue in this vein for years to come. A crisis of this scale and its downward pressure on media results in a complete revaluation of all forms of advertising and promotion – authentic and quality publishing could see a revival in fortunes.
