‘Maslow argued that the failure to have needs met at various stages of the hierarchy could lead to illness, particularly psychiatric illness or mental health issues. Individuals whose physiological needs are not met may die or become extremely ill. When safety needs are not met, post-traumatic stress may occur’.
Take a sneak peak at those three chunky bottom sections of the triangle. Physiological needs, safety needs and belonging needs. COVID19 has something for everyone down there.
Threat of sickness and death to you and your loved ones. Boom! Take-away your ability to earn an income. Crash! Separate you from people who love and understand you. Kapow! Corona Virus (I love that it has a casual name and a formal name. Today I will take my virus in a suit. Tomorrow I may prefer my virus in jeans and a tucked in shirt), we digress, Coro (its name on a football field) is like a giant, sickness gorilla, here to ferociously rattle the bars of even the sturdiest of sanities. And rattle it has. You can despise people for drinking 1 litre bottles of sanitiser from their 42 litre stash all you want but it is only a symptom of the whole human race feeling like complete and utter raving nutters.
So, when it comes to your marketing, it is safe to assume that whether your target market is CEO’s, Product Managers or Trapeze artists you must pivot for the next 3-6 months to reflect an unprecedented amount of CoronaCrazy (CV’s name on a Friday afternoon before you are about to hit the weekend and realise the weekend will be spent with exactly the same people, love yoooooooooou, in exactly the same house, doing mostly what you did during the week).
Some B2C and B2B brands have already done a beautiful, fast turnaround pivot. Here’s two lovely B2C examples from McDonalds and Nike.
McDonalds with a community service announcement creating a healthy social distance between their arches.
Nike with a community service announcement encouraging people to stay inside.
However some brands are yet to pivot. If you fall into this category it’s time to give the people what they need when they are feeling more than a little on edge. We’ve broken it into 4 categories – validation, help, presence, hope and reflection.
Validation
The world isn’t the same at it was, continuing to blast out the same content makes it seem like your entire marketing department have been replaced with robots. Your marketing must acknowledge the virus or at the very least not run content that is in complete denial of it.
The strongest messages here are validating and then announcing what your business is uniquely doing in response.
The messaging needs to work with what stage we are at during the pandemic. Two weeks ago it was ok to send out messages saying we are spraying our staff with Glen 20 and giving our reception chairs Dettol baths hourly. Now we are locked down that becomes irrelevant.
Here’s a great example of IMB, validating and announcing what they are doing to help. They’ve also opened the door to an on-going dialogue by telling us they will keep us informed
Got no unique way to help? Look to other parts of your business that show you are human and that you care.
Help
So we come to our next section ‘help’. This is the biggy. What content can we produce that actually helps the people around us, many of whom are still working, albeit amongst piles of washing, screaming children and barking dogs.
Help, doesn’t need to come directly in the form of testing kits and face masks or as a community service announcement like the McDonalds or Nike examples. It can show up in helping the world work differently or having the tech in place to enable work life to go on as we knew it. We specialise in B2B tech. B2B tech is still very relevant at times like this. We paused all our clients advertising and social content for a day to do a full audit of existing content and create a plan for the new. For some clients existing content was still very relevant and all that was needed was tweaks to intro copy.
Here’s an example of our client CoTe CCM Solutions who launched a new white paper* four days before the world went crazy. The white paper discusses CCM strategies that are still very helpful during this time but the intro copy was a too general. We updated it from this to this.
*CoTe Software White paper – The 6 CCM principles that shape customer behaviour
For clients that have unique aspects to their business that could be bought to the fore. We created brand spanking new content.
Agile Consultancy Elabor8 were very well positioning to produce content that provides advise on how businesses move seamlessly to remote working*. Here’s two of the pieces we produced at breakneck speed.
*Elabor8 article – The hierarchy of remote working needs & Remote and agile?
Be present
You know that Screen Time recorder buried in your settings that you never like to look at because you know it will make you feel like you don’t spend enough time exercising, meditating, studying, looking into your children in the eyes. Check it. I bet it is through the roof. We are information checking, reassurance seeking and boredom annihilating at an unprecedented level all online. What we aren’t doing is wandering around airports and going to conferences. Move all media spend to digital. Your people are here.
According to WARC the Chinese market ad spend during the pandemic has remained consistent however there has been a flight from out of home media to digital. Kantor has reporte in China an increase of social media traffic by 61% over normal usage rates.
Beyond media look at events you were participating in or holding. How can these be changed to a digital platform. For our clients we are moving event spend to webinars, live streaming and online meet-ups. Same core content, themes and ideas but delivered in Corona safe channels, in short sharp bursts, where people can view from the comfort of their study, kitchen or under the bed (if hiding from children)
Hope
This will all be over at some point and at our low points, we need to know that there is a chink of light twinkling through the closed curtains of quarantine.
Dave Ramsey the budget guy is consistently putting out hopeful, positive, soul soothing content. That makes you feel less like necking a bottle of tequila and more like tip toeing around the garden in bare feet.
Reflection and Seeing the good
You know when you’re neck deep in a crisis and someone says ‘At least something something, something didn’t happen’ and you say ‘Yeah you’re right’ but secretly you want to smother them with a pillow because I DON’T CARE IF SOMETHING SOMETHING didn’t happen this HAS!!!! That is not seeing the good, that is being an invalidating (insert your own expletive here).
Seeing the good, is on reflection, the learnings and growth we can take out of this.
Bobbi Brown is doing a brilliant job of this on Instagram
We are currently in a very human and people-y time. Dig deep and show the peeps in all their distress that you care, that you are here for them and you have unique aspects to you that will help them through.
I’ll leave you with my favourite parts of Bills Gates reflections doing the rounds last week.
‘This virus reminds us that we are all connected. It is something that has the same effect on one person as it does on another’.
‘This situation reminds us that our real work is not our job, it is not what we do. Our real job is to look after one another, protect one another and benefit from one another.’
