Everyone is searching for the “new normal” in brand management. Depending on your brand’s product or service category, the future normal may be very different. Here are a few thoughts to help you take decisive action and create a path forward:
- Use a clean-sheet approach to planning. Use current customer, supplier and stakeholder feedback to assess your situation and inform multiple planning scenarios. Resist over-analyzing past data, as it may be unreliable at best. Develop top-level plans that cover: a) the activities required to stay in business, b) what your “gut” feeling tells you about when consumer demand will return and c) a best-case scenario should recovery move faster than expected. Create decision-making guidelines to adapt to the range of outcomes your brand experiences along this journey.
- Understand and respond to the needs versus the wants of your customers. Customers are looking to you to assure them that their needs are being met. A complex set of economic, health and political factors are now driving emotional purchase behaviors. Many buying decisions today are based on satisfying basic needs. That may mean that less-expensive private label brands and discount retailers are being tried for the first time. Take the time to adapt your value proposition to this new competitive reality.
- Identify ways to make your customer’s experience easier, safer and more convenient. Consider making digital a bigger part of your marketing and brand experience. New apporaches might include a re-imagining of retail space to meet social distancing guidelines, to be touchless/low-touch and respectful of employee and customer health concerns. This could mean requiring the use of masks and implementing updated cleaning processes. It also may make sense to incorporate home delivery into your service offerings.
- Demonstrate leadership and social responsibility. Brands that behave as good neighbors during a crisis are remembered for how they stepped up. It means being selfless and doing the right thing to help those in greatest need. Companies that demonstrate this type of determination and perseverance are the hallmark of our country’s greatness.
- Continue or restart brand communications. Demonstrate empathy in your messages and let customers know how the brand is adjusting to the pandemic. Do your part to restore customer confidence, optimism and finding the right way to a new normal.
Looking for more ways to adapt your brand to the pandemic’s influence on customer behavior? Read our white paper, “How Covid-19 Is Changing Consumer Behavior—And What To Do About It.”