What Customers Need to Hear from You During a crisis

 

Many brands have turned off their marketing efforts due to epidemic, pulled back their advertising efforts fearful of offending or taking advantage of the unfortunate situation for corporate gain. More than 25% of the advertisers have stopped their advertising efforts, pausing all their paid marketing communications or the first and second quarter of this year.

What should be the strategy during the epidemic/ crisis? A survey conducted among consumers to understand how they are responding to the brand's marketing during the crisis. The analysis is given below

Do consumers want to hear from brands during a crisis?

The consumers would like to hear from the brand comforting and reassuring them and providing what brands are doing in response. Brands should avoid communications that cause anxiety and concern without offering hope and solution to the consumers. They should also keep consumers informed about how they can access their products and service.

What do consumers expect from a brand during a crisis?

Consumers see the brand as critical partners to government, NGOs, as the strong relationships brands have with consumers, can be used to leverage action. Consumers view brands as a safety net, ready to step up to assist anyone not helped by the government's response.

Brands must strive to be authentic, accountable and audacious in their communications. They should lead where you can work together with NGOs and governments recognising that they have the capacity to jointly enact solutions.

The core expectation is that brands will do what is right for the employees, suppliers, consumers, and society at large, without regard to how much it costs. Brands that placed their profits before people during a crisis would lose their trust forever.

How brands can help during a crisis?

• Educate the public by transforming their media presence into reliable, factual information that instructs people about the crisis, how to protect themselves and the progress being made to fight against it. Given that social media is full of fake news, consumers loo to brands they trust to provide the straight story.
• Offer free or lower price products to help people meet the challenges, especially those most in need, like healthcare workers or those forced into unemployment due to crisis. 
• Shift production to making products ned t fight the epidemic Wherever possible the production facilities should be used to make essential goods required to fight the epidemic in consultation with government health authorities.
• Bring people together by facilitating community, offering empathy and providing social support. 

What type of stories should the brands tell?

A company's marketing communications should not ignore the ground realities especially during times of crisis/ epidemics, and they should recognise and acknowledge the impact it is having on people's lives. 

Companies should also not take advantage of the crisis. Brand storytelling should focus on providing real solutions to the crisis rather than hard-selling their products. 

During a crisis, consumers would ignore all the new product communications, unless it was designed to help them with crisis-related challenges. Brands should carefully check the facts before passing it on to consumers, especially health-related information. They should not get drawn into political debates and should bridge the divide among people during the crisis.

Brands should avoid humour stories that were too light-hearted in tone during a crisis. Consumers deem celebrities and media influencers to be less credible and favour true expertise and desire to receive information directly from a doctor, health authority.

What should brands expect from consumers during a crisis?

Social media provides a strong platform for consumers to punish brands that were not responding well to the crisis. Crisis provides brands with an opportunity to stand out from the crowd as a result of innovative or compassionate ways of responding to the crisis. 

While trust is always important to consumers, they turn towards brands they were sure they can trust, proving the efforts of legacy brands that have managed a strong consumer brand relationship before the crisis.

The present epidemic has changed the way people are relating to each other isolated in our homes and pulling us away from our social milieu. It is likely to change how we think, behave, consume both short term and beyond. 

At this moment, the deepest need is one of trust. The message is clear to brands - step up and help, not just their customers and employees but the world at large protect, support and care for all and innovate in public's best interest. Brands that respond to this need have a tremendous opportunity to reinforce trust and loyalty as they contribute to mitigating the crisis. 

What Customers Need to Hear from You During the COVID Crisis

by Jill Avery and Richard Edelman HBSWK 07 APR 2020