You certainly don’t need me to tell you that it’s been a wild past few weeks, months, years. Whether it’s natural disasters and extreme weather events, breakout diseases and pandemics, atrocities and acts of violence, a raw political climate, the Dodgers winning the World Series…there’s always something that pricks at our conscience or compels our attention.
An interconnected world means that crises that were once in a far-flung corner of the globe are now just a click away. It used to be said that “all politics is local,” but that’s only part of the truth: everything now is local. Just ask your social media algorithm.
For every business in any industry, it can understandably be difficult to navigate marketing ourselves appropriately, knowing that we’re often sending our messaging into a whirlwind. Or deciding how, when or if we should speak to any number of situations happening in our world.
How do we balance our business objectives with our heartbeat without compromising either, or both?
I’ve been involved in various facets of digital marketing now for nearly ten years. Prior to this, I spent time working in and with nonprofits and charitable organizations, and went to school for philosophy and studied extensively in the humanities. It’s precisely this kind of dilemma that gets to both my heart and my lived experience.
And, in true philosophical style, I don’t hide the fact that I offer no clear answers one way or the other, just some of what I hope are helpful guideposts that can help inform what you do when it comes to you as your brand responding – or not responding – to crisis situations or any kind of hard times.
Know Thyself
Without a clear, and clearly established, sense of who you are as a company and brand, messaging will come out disjointed and run the risk of misalignment.
My core marketing mantra is Brand is a values statement, and that applies everywhere from Fortune 500 titans of industry to a storefront mission helping those in poverty. Who you present yourself to be is more than a logo, colorways, your digital footprint or marketing and PR deliverables.
These things all reflect you, but so do your products and services, the way your customers and workforce are treated, the ways in which you contribute to the community, how you engage with the public in general. If these things aren’t considered, addressed and aligned and, more importantly, lived out, eventually, it will show.
Brand strategy documentation, style guides, best practices manuals, persona work (more on that below), these should all be anchored with a clear sense of identity, purpose, focus and mission, and every member of your team should be clearly aligned with them.
Know Your Audience
At a base level, read the room. The best business is conducted not in quantity of transactions, but in quality of relationships.
Does this matter to your buyers and readers?
Having a clear sense of who you’re talking to, and internalizing the sense that the people you want to reach are, well, people you want to reach is in and of itself a shaping factor in what you say outside the scope of your business and how you say it.
If this sounds vaguely familiar to you, that’s because this is the foundation of big-I Inbound marketing.
This means regularly revisiting personas and ideal customer profiles and updating as needed, preferably with data derived from the relationships you’re actively nurturing. It also means social listening, utilizing business intelligence to better understand the people in and around your field.
Don’t assume; do the (not always easy!) reconnaissance work and know the people you’re speaking to out there. Your messaging is only as effective as the level of respect as you have for your audience.
Corporate consultant and research academic Andrea Hollingsworth speaks to this in her book, The Compassion Advantage: “People trust and follow leaders whose very presence exudes a strong, centered, thereness. [Thereness] assures them they are safe and connected—that they’re cared for, and they belong.”
Thereness doesn’t happen – how effective can any marketing messaging be without being based on a trusting connection? – without first a clear sense of self and those you are trying to address.
Be Genuine Without Being Cloying
There are still lessons to be learned nearly five years after COVID.
When the world ground to a halt in March 2020, do you remember the marketing emails every retailer sent to their email lists? At first, these messages felt earnest and meaningful, because the situation we were thrown into was new and novel. Before long, the verbiage all started to sound similar, same pacing, same phrasing – it was gen AI before ChatGPT unlocked the emerging content generation landscape. 🔐 🚀
Before long, the new and novel context felt like a repeated slap in the face; a several-times-a-day reminder that we were in a dangerous pandemic and confined to our homes.
Commercials fell into a similar trap:
It’s one thing to respond quickly to an emerging situation or crisis. It’s another to be different without distinction, as these emails and TV spots all were. This lends itself to being viewed as virtue signaling or falling in line, or worse yet, putting salt on the wound.
Going back to Hollingsworth above, there was no awareness or thereness to any of this messaging – just a prevailing sense from company leaders that they needed to say something. So they all ended up saying the same thing.
It’s another matter to get so wrapped up in an emergent situation that you lose the plot of marketing your business entirely. Messaging that comes off as saccharine, cloying or just plain cheesy can be as much a brand destroyer as a scandal (think Enron) or a product that fails at launch (we see you, BlackBerry Storm).
‘Authenticity’ is a word that gets thrown around without much regard for what it truly means. The primary definition per Oxford is ‘genuine,’ and that’s valid enough. But Oxford also has a philosophical definition that comes from the existentialists: “…denoting an emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive, and responsible mode of human life.”
Emotionally appropriate, purposive and responsible messaging hits the mark every time. It also merits mentioning that AI won’t, and can’t, gauge these things. An experienced content team (preferably with a good editor!) should review and vet any messaging to ensure that these thresholds are met.
Act quickly, not rashly
“This is what happens when you hurry through a maze; the faster you go, the worse you are entangled.” – Seneca the Younger, Letter 44 to Lucilius
To be clear before I discuss the example below, I do not advocate for putting political leanings front and center on your business messaging.
During this past summer, presidential candidate Kamala Harris stopped at a Penzeys Spices location in Pittsburgh while on the campaign trail. It drew national attention to Penzeys, the Wisconsin-based spice retailer whose owner has never been shy about his politics. In response, and unfortunately on cue, Penzeys was buried beneath negative Yelp comments, social media firebombs and all the partisan accoutrements we’ve grown too accustomed to in recent years.
For owner Bill Penzey, Jr., this wasn’t the first time a spotlight was placed squarely either on him or his brand. He took all that publicity and turned it into a promotional opportunity as much as a political statement: He put the products Harris purchased on sale, calling them “Kamala Spices.” He also took the opportunity to add promotional pricing to other products. In response, orders for all their products reportedly soared.
Again, partisanship is ill-advised for just about any business out there.
Having said that, though, if we zoom out from the specifics, the hallmarks I’m talking about of marketing in a crisis context are all here: Penzeys Spices has a well-established brand identity with a premium quality product, they have confidence in knowing who their audience is, and they respond quickly and earnestly to emerging events purposefully and appropriately within their established sense of brand. And they’ve done something similar with other circumstances beyond politics: they’ve routinely done promotional events and charitable initiatives related to hurricane relief and other humanitarian efforts through the years through their ground pepper.
The precise variables may not be what one prefers, but the formula – one that works in either a B2B or B2C setting – was developed and executed with precision. The results engaged their audience, elevated their brand and drove revenues higher.
Stay the Course
Most importantly, don’t blow your marketing roadmap up simply because there is a crisis.
Yes, there may be good reason to press pause, sideline a campaign or even spike a piece of content. Any healthy marketing strategy anticipates disruption and plans for contingencies. If there is a need to turn on a dime, plan B is ready to go and any disruption to your marketing team or efforts is minimal.
Once those marketing gears are stopped, though, it can be awfully difficult to get them turning at full gear again. It’s better to slow down, respond to circumstances and resume, than it is to either react out of impulse or hit a killswitch, only to realize that there was no backup plan.
Marketing strategy should be fairly evergreen; it’s subject matter and topical content that is flexible and malleable.
Don’t dwell on the crisis: Let it heal
Equally important to knowing how to appropriately message during a crisis is knowing how to transition out of crisis messaging. Lingering on the event too long leaves a sour note with your audience, placing the focus on you rather than them.
Think Andy Bernard from The Office: Where did he go to college? And what was everyone’s response whenever he invoked his alma mater?
Like recovering from a broken leg, once you’re back up and moving around, it’s hard, if not impossible to remember the feeling when the bone was reset, when you were on crutches, when you first put pressure on your foot. It’s not that people don’t care anymore; but that they naturally need to move forward from crisis and trauma once healing has taken place.
Our ability to move forward and our ability to heal can be one and the same. It’s as true for your marketing as it is for yourself.
Having a Trusted Advisor Makes All the Difference
During tumultuous times or crisis periods in this Very Online Era, it’s too easy to lose focus on your priorities and chase trends, current events and crises in the name of clicks and striving for greater relevance. The reality is that, yes, there are times that do call for speaking to situations and perhaps even pausing your content initiatives, but it’s just that – a pause. You have to be ready to press the play button again.
Without a trust-based relationship with someone who can speak into these kinds of circumstances, you can find yourself adrift from your marketing tactics, losing both that crucial leading edge of your flywheel or sales funnel, as well as a handle on the value-rich relationships you have with your existing customers.
Beyond the deliverables you expect – content marketing, SEO, web assets, paid media advertising and RevOps work, to name just a few – Kuno’s client services team is here as trusted, experienced advisers, able to provide expert insight and help you adjust on the fly, when life intrudes on business, new industry developments impact how you do your work, or for anything in between.
We’ve been consulting and delivering services with agility, impact and heart for almost 25 years. With a track record of experience and expertise doing marketing that matters for companies we believe in, Kuno Creative can deliver results for you, as well.
