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Marketing Through A Crisis

We understand that navigating through a financial and social crisis is tough. We have collated some previous learnings from economic downturns to provide pointers to help brands through the current crisis.

Here are 5 thoughts to underpin your marketing at this time:

Continue to communicate, but be mindful of the message

IPA research has shown that brands who significantly cut back or stopped marketing activity experienced a much slower recovery post-crisis.  So continue to communicate but keep the brand to the fore and ensure that the message is relevant to the issues consumers are currently facing.

Re-evaluate success KPIs

Attention and resources are often focused on short-termism during a crisis.  However, by focusing on brand building and growing your SOV (as per point 1), the longer-term gains in profitability are likely to outreach the short-term reduction

Be creative

Brands often turn to functional, performance-focused messaging to drive short-term profit, but this can be folly.  Creative campaigns deliver a profit multiplier of at least tenfold, so focus on quality over quantity

Brand behaviour counts

Positive brand behaviour builds long-term reputation and purchase intent in the minds of consumers (plus some healthy organic PR and social coverage) but must add value to the new reality of consumers’ lives.  A good example is LVMH adapting its perfume production lines to produce hand sanitiser vs the backlash against Sports Direct when it proposed keeping its stores open.

Review working processes

Remote working will put a strain on operational processes, so it’s a perfect time to review and realign ways of working.  Ensure that the best processes, structures and lines of communication are in place to engage all stakeholders and agency partners effectively, and that collective goals are agreed by all involved.

We’re here if you need any guidance, advice or just want to chat things through during this unprecedented period.

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