How to Adjust Your Brand Strategy in the Time of Coronavirus
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all of our lives have turned upside down. What we learned from this present scenario is to get updated in the next. In such a crisis time, it may be difficult for marketers to know where to start when we are seeing major shifts in behavioral trends.
Consumers are most often seen engaged in downloading gaming apps, spending even more time on social media, and streaming more movies and scripted programming.
In the past months, brands and brand positioning had undergone rapid changes.
Seeing the present scenario, what strategies can brands adopt to serve and grow their customer base?
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Create Value for your Community
In the future, brands need to think harder about how and what exactly they can serve
to the communities, they are serving.
Potential clients and customers are always eager to know how the products offered by their favorite brands are making our lives better. In the future, most probably, creating only a relatable ad or a cool idea will not going to help you. People feel vulnerable right now. So, it is critical to present your ideas or services with empathy and transparency. For example, recognizing the hardship on their customers, many banks have moved to waive overdraft fees.
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Use the RID- Method to Decide How to Take Action
All your ideas should be relevant, impactful, and doable. Choose an area that is relevant to your company and your customers.
Do something that will have an impact and will solve problems quickly and effectively. Finally, think about what should be done for your business. You need to satisfy the questions like what can you deliver in a short time frame and what resources can you realistically allocate to this project.
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What Can You Do to Take Action?
First of all, take a moment to look and assess at your core values, mission statement, and purpose. You can easily come up with loads of ideas that might help solve the ongoing problems. You can ask yourself what your core values are and how you can contribute something that is aligned with them. For instance, if your company’s value is “connecting” then how can you connect people? On a local level, you can offer your service to community organizers or highlight the work of charities that help the elderly connect. A specific, local or personal touch may add feelings of community creation and integration.
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Use Media in More Agile Ways
Marketers will want to build more rapid-response operating models internally and with agencies so as to quickly pivot creative messages. As the crisis evolves,
accessing remote production and creative capacity will become particularly necessary.
You can keep promoting your brand in a way that shows a commitment to public safety in just the way Nike did. It immediately moved to adopt a new message: “Play inside, play for the world.” Beyond creativity, marketers should consider modifying their media mix, since the mix of actual media platforms used by consumers changes quickly.
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Associate Your Brand with Good
People might remember brands for their good and safety acts in a time of crisis, provided if it is done with true heart and generosity. It is somewhat similar to donating to food banks, providing free products for medical personnel, or continuing to pay employees when the company’s doors are closed. Content that elevates anxiety and promotes positive messaging will take you a long way to enhancing the brand. However, companies need to show that their contributions are not solely for commercial benefit.
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Track Trends and Build Scenarios
Marketers will be able to gain better insights in real time if human behavioral trends are tracked frequently. Marketers may want to measure consumption trends on a regular basis to better adapt messaging. They can closely observe the conversation across social media platforms, community sites, and e-commerce product pages so as to get
opportunities. Companies should take the idea of quickly building dashboards with this kind of data. Marketers should consider building deeper connections with their C-suite colleagues to provide insights to executives.
The marketing team should work closely with finance and operations to forecast different scenarios and potential outcomes.
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Adapt to New Ways of Working to Keep Delivering
Isn’t that encouraging how quickly many companies were able to transition to remote working arrangements? Deploying collaboration technologies enable teams to stay connected and remain productive. They
can seamlessly provide chat, file sharing, meeting, and call capabilities. Recognizing that an in-face sales call is unlikely to transpire in the coming weeks, partners were “pitching” remotely. Already, virtual happy hours are emerging as the new normal to build team morale. Leaders have to give their best to transition each element of the operating model—from marketing to sales, to service—to this new normal. Maybe new sources of innovation and even margin improvement will emerge out of our current discomfort in the coming future.