Being a brave brand and maintaining marketing investments in a crisis is a challenge yet it pays.
2020 is definitely a year which has challenged us to up our brave on the personal and business front. History tells us that brave brands that have risen to the challenge do better than those that don’t.
Like the great stock market crash of 1929, Covid 19 was (we hope) one of those once-in-a-century impacts on business.
Few saw it coming. When it arrived, many companies and households took immediate action to safeguard their reserves, putting staff and contracts on hold or worse cancelling plans and people altogether. Nearly everyone we know was affected in some way.
On a personal level we cancelled New Zealand travel (largely because the risk of having to go into long hotel quarantine was too great and, being in the midst of major renovations, we could not afford to be out of Australia for too long.) We had little choice but to bite the bullet and keep going. On the upside we interest rates were low, we had some reserves and the Australian government was doing a great job helping small businesses. At Action we just wanted to keep things flowing, for ourselves, our agencies and our clients.
That meant continuing for clients — even though some could not pay at the time. Because their having a new website would help their business re-launch itself when things turned around — and that it did. It meant doing our first Zoom research focus group –—which actually went quite well. And doing that during lockdown, highlighted how well the client — a school — was managing distance learning and community engagement . It meant reassuring other clients to maintain their investments in SEO as more and more people were online. That they did — and during 2020 their business has never been busier.
Oddly in 2019 we had read a prescient Forbes article When A Recession Comes, Don’t Stop Advertising, which included a number of case studies and argued: “When marketers cut back on their ad spending, the brand loses its “share of mind” with consumers, with the potential of losing current – and possibly future – sales. An increase in “share of voice” typically leads to in an increase in “share of market.” An increase in market share results, with an increase in profits.”
Mid-2020 Forbes followed this article with another from the Senior Marketing Lecturer from Harvard Business and Edelman’s Richard Edelman on brand communication during Covid-19. The take-out: “Now is not the time for brands to go silent. They should instead convey comforting and reassuring messaging and keep consumers up-to-date regarding ways to access their products and services. But brand touting can backfire.”
You can read the full article and discover some great advice here. As 2020 draws to a close, it seems that the descriptions of “the war on Covid and the battle to find a vaccine,” have shown us a little of what it may have been like to live through the challenges of a global conflict like WWII or indeed the Spanish Flu.
For us in times like this people look for brands they can trust and rely on and that demonstrate empathy and compassion. It’s the time for brands to truly live their values. In that vein, this article might also be valuable reading, along with this marketing magazine piece, How to be brave without breaking your brand.
We’ve seen tremendous resilience and rethink happening this year. Hard times can be a good teacher and it pays to be brave.
If you’d like to up your courage, have a brave brand or improve the way you connect with customers, get in touch today. We have experience in bold marketing.
