the product/service/content that they consider useful or essential to deal with the quarantine or the situation they find themselves in at that moment. Nothing more.
How will companies be affected by the Coronavirus?
The reality for all of us involved in digital and its communication channels is that we don’t need a salesperson with motivational phrases telling us that everything will work out, or to interrupt our digital experience with a letter from our CEO titled “We are with you during these difficult times.” Today, less is more.
And it is this simplicity that must make us aware of not falling into the same mistake as always: Consumers do not care about brands.
According to Mark Ritson during a Mini MBA webinar by AdWeek last month (2020), brands will go through two main stages: Crisis and Recession. During the first, brands can find themselves in three situations: Flex, Fix and Freeze.
The “Flex” situation refers to those brands that are not severely affected, and that within their catalogue may have had changes in demand that may even have been favorable to them – like any supermarket.
The second tells us about those brands that urgently need to change in order to survive, a clothing brand with a physical store, for example.
The third is about those brands that cannot do much to try to cope with the situation and that maintaining the business involves exogenous factors, here let's think about an airline. Whatever the situation, the business will have to adopt quick and tactical decisions that allow it to continue with its executions in the short term.
“The business will have to make quick, tactical decisions that allow it to continue with its executions in the short term.”
The 4 Ps of Marketing
And that's where Ritson reinforces that many marketers gambling email list make the mistake of forgetting a concept that is more than 60 years old but is still just as valid: The 4 Ps (at some point someone told me that there are now 6, or 8, but for the sake of simplicity of this text we will stick to the original concept).
These marketing basics have not changed, even in the current context, and each of them is a button that allows you to attract new consumers.
The problem arises when you believe that the only button you can press is the P for promotion.
And there you have content agencies rushing to make the new viral template on Instagram Stories, thinking of the new emotional ad or bringing to the table the winning concept of the new challenge that the entire audience is expected to take, which has your product at its center.
These tactics may or may not work, but it is certain that, of the 4 buttons, this is the wrong one to press as a first option. Certain brands are using the rest of the options to stand out in this crisis, and their actions carry earned media :
Product
Uber Flash, which has enabled its platinum drivers a new way to enter the platform: The user will be able to transport all types of legal items, as long as they fit in the trunk of the car.
