Pandemic Messaging

Plenty of businesses are using Coronavirus as a reason to reduce marketing spend and stop talking to their customers. However, there’s plenty of research to suggest that that might be counterproductive in the long run. Now, more than ever customers are craving information, entertainment, and above all distraction. In fact, a recent study from marketing week showed that only 8% of consumers felt that brands should stop advertising due to the coronavirus outbreak. Other reports suggest that brands who do stop advertising can quickly atrophy, wasting in months the positive image they have built over years.

As businesses scramble to plan a communications strategy that can navigate Coronavirus, a wide range of approaches have been on display, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Seated firmly in the ridiculous corner are brands whose posts have been tone deaf. Communications whose message is business as normal can seem haughty, boastful, out of touch, and even downright insensitive when others are feeling real pain or having to furlough trusted staff.

Perhaps the worst of these were companies whose immediate response was to overtly protect profits at the cost of undermining staff safety. UK budget sports retailer Sports Direct was forced under weight of outrage to reverse its decisions to keep stores open and increase the cost of at-home gym equipment. Other u-turners have included Premier League football clubs seeking to take advantage of the government’s furlough scheme despite incredible revenues. For outspoken Weatherspoon’s owner, Tim Martin, it took graffiti on premises as well as online outrage before he retracted a cringeworthy kitchen video which proposed immediately ending all payments to staff.

Other companies haven’t so much got their new tone wrong as failed to update old messages that are no longer appropriate. Even in the grip of quarantine, Papa Johns flyers boasted of their outdoor spaces delivery policy, with the headline, “pizza in the park”. Having been introduced in 2019, it was not a new initiative, but they had failed to remove that messaging from circulation fast enough and by distributing it were unwittingly encouraging people to break lockdown regulations.

What is paramount is that brands are not seen to be exploiting or profiteering from the situation. At the same time, in trying situations, the temptation is for brands to be too safe, and the handmaid of safety is so often boredom. The Marketing Week study found that only 41% felt brands should avoid humorous tones. When done right, there is a place for amusement even in the darkest pandemic.

The companies who navigate these reefs, and communicate proactively, empathetically, and engagingly with their key stakeholders could come out of the other side at a distinct advantage compared to their competitors.

In short, yes you probably need to rip up your old marketing plan, but it should be being replaced with something new and relevant.

With that in mind, and having talked about what to avoid, here’s a brief rundown of five types of crisis messaging and how they might work?

If you are just thinking about putting out a statement for the sake of it, feel free to stop reading here. We’ve all received the hundreds of copycat emails that it’s clear were only sent because someone saw other companies putting out a statement on their response to Covid-19. The world does not need more of those.

If you have thoughts and information you genuinely want to share with your customers to help you both get through this, read on.

• Informative

This type of contact focuses on keeping your customers in the loop. What’s happening with Covid-19 and your industry? How does it affect your customers? Remember that clients don’t necessarily care how it’s impacting on your profits or internal organisation, but they will be interested in what that means in practical terms. Opening hours, purchase limits, timelines.

This type of communication should also focus on keeping customers safe in ways that are not necessarily strictly associated with your brand. Reinforce social distancing and explain what measures you’ve brought in to do the same.

By making it seem like you’re suffering with them you will sound empathetic and approachable.

Tell them how you are looking after your staff and contractors. Assuming the answer is well, you’ll sound like a good company to work for. And good companies to work for often translate into companies that people want to purchase from.

It is important to remember that Coronavirus is hitting everyone, even if not necessarily equally. Every single brand has a story to tell about what it is doing to keep its employees safe. If your brand tone means that’s a fairly dry update on what measures are being brought in, fine. If your brand tone can be a little more risqué, that might mean a witty account of how you and your team are finding working from home. If you do go in for this approach, make sure to try to keep it down to earth. Struggles home-schooling the kids or feeling tired from having to walk the dog are good. The fact that you’ve run out of magnums of Dom Perignon might not go down so well.

If you don’t think one tone works for external stakeholders, it might still work well to run internally. I know of at least one firm whose internal communications involve a weekly CEO working from home update whose content is roughly 50% gin and 50% pets!

• The greater good

This type of crisis messaging focuses on how your business is pivoting to help the wider community. Recent weeks have seen some of the best of this, with brands like Brewdog turning their factories to making hand sanitiser, Formula 1 teams leveraging their state-of-the-art technology to produce ventilators, and outdoor clothing brand Barbour turning their focus indoors to deliver scrubs and PPE for the NHS.

If you work in services rather than manufacturing, or if your resources don’t lend themselves to something this practical, that’s fine too. You can still find something to promote or champion. Do you work with a great supplier who is now finding times tough? Promote them through your social channels or your website. Use the same tools to tell people about great initiatives that you’ve spotted in your industry or local area. Donate to them and encourage your clients to do the same. This doesn’t have to be on the scale of Apple pledging 20 million masks or Unilever donating ¢100m. Small, local, efforts, if proportionate to the size of your business, can be equally effective.

There is a tightrope to be walked here so that such moves do not cross the boundary into self-promotion. Brands would be well advised to choose minimalistic branding in any new product sectors they turn to. Some commentators felt that Brewdog’s advertising was just a little too overt on its hand sanitiser, but the brand has a reputation for boldness which means it could get away with it in most quarters. Minimalism is probably safer for most companies.

Even with that risk, this situation is probably a case of something being better than nothing.

• Distraction

We’ve probably all had conversations over the last month where we’ve found ourselves wishing we could talk about something other than Coronavirus. Needless to say, consumers are the same. If your brand can provide stimulating content that takes them away from the world of quarantines, lockdowns and gloomy news updates, people will thank you for it. Products have a natural advantage here. In sport, where I do a lot of work, that means finding and sharing positive news stories, for example of people raising money by running marathons in their living rooms, or exploring innovative ways to help people connect with the things they enjoy, which might mean through quizzes or challenges for example.

In distraction marketing a sales presence is almost nil. It can be subtly in the background but mainly you are purely aiming to entertain. The benefit to you will be medium and long-term, often sub-conscious, but certainly present.

• A golden past

Golden past messaging is heavily linked to both informative and distraction messaging. The goal here is to subtly show off some of your achievements in a positive, engaging way. You might do this by digging into archives to find interesting statistics, or provide access to old materials. This is what theatres are trying to tap into by providing live streams of old shows. It is what broadcasters are trying to do by running repeats. A good tone to aim for here is one of happy, stoic nostalgia. Negative messages that evoke a “back in my day” mentality won’t wash. The past is to be tapped into to provide strength not criticism.

If you have access to old materials, especially ones that haven’t been published but would interest your customers, now is a great time to dig them out. If you have multiple information streams or product lines, now is the moment to think about how you could combine them to create new content.

Messaging that does a successful job conjuring this golden past, will lead inexorably to how the future might look even brighter.

• Greener grass

This type of messaging borrows from the others to present a vision of what things will look like in the future. How could the pandemic change your industry for the better? If you work in cycling, will this create new cyclists, or highlight the need for better infrastructure in towns and cities? If you work in theatre, will this make people more grateful for culture and the arts, more determined to enjoy the plays or musicals you are putting on? If you are in the food and beverage industry, could the pandemic encourage people to buy more locally, or more environmentally responsibly?

In many ways this will reflect the kind of strategic thinking that you are already undertaking. What will the new world look like, and what do you need to do to thrive in it?

For this type of messaging, you are trying to paint of picture to consumers of what you hope it will look like, and how that will lead to you enjoying a better relationship with them. Naturally as you are doing so, it is important to avoid whitewashing. People are suffering mentally, physically, financially, and socially. Unicorns won’t fly here and pointing out a long list of positives of a pandemic is unlikely to earn you many fans. Consequently, the tone should be one of hope for the future cut with awareness of the current turmoil.

In this kind of communication, it is important to empathise overtly and explicitly with your customers. The types of messages here include “We are looking forward to supporting you (the client) with new X in the future”, or “thank you for your help or adherence to the rules that will allow us all to prosper together” or “we can’t wait to see you in our stores on the other side”. In other words, you are joining yourselves with the customer, linking your fates, and empathising with the journey you are taking through Coronavirus together.

The silver lining should not forget the cloud that brought it.

Summary

Whichever messaging you choose, and whatever tone you choose to write in, keep it personal.

The number of generic emails from brands telling you how they are dealing with Covid has become a standing joke. Make sure yours stands out. If it does that, and if it does so by informing, engaging, distracting, and empathising, then you can continue to build your brand through these turbulent times. Many consumers are looking for ways to support businesses that can prove they are doing the right thing, from local food boxes to multinational corporations.