I’ve been asked to explain what has been my approach during this crisis time regarding the Brand strategy. So, since sharing is caring, let us summarise some thoughts and directions that I am taking now.
The crisis exist and will exist for next months, this is now clear and not less scaring for everyone. An extraordinary and fundamental disruption of all our schemes happening everywhere in the world.
A crisis generates an “uncertain” environment where “right” decisions has to be taken very “fast”. Therefore, for us all, plans and projects simply crashed completely and a new way to deal with the situation to maximise the possible benefits were needed very fast.
It was clear since the very beginning that all Brands were moving in being present into the crisis with messages and visual entertainments.
In a time where the value of the Brand is strongly determined by its “Purpose”, where the commitment toward people and society cannot stop just simply reducing the media investments, everyone had to rethink very rapidly a way to be present in the daily life of persons even if not in the traditional way.
And this is why I disrupted completely the usual organisation of the team and re-aligned the resources around a strong content strategy, internal and external, to focus on our “raison d’être”: enhancing life of people. And since for us “enhancing” means value we were actively taking the voice of all internal stakeholders and bring to all our channels all the positive and important initiatives that were happening all across the organisation to support employees, customers and people in general.
The increase in creativity and into the attention on what is happening in the world have brought many very positive examples and this was, from the very beginning, thanks to the fact that many good professionals were listening and trying to understand the facts in order to construe the new reality and create a narrative around it, in the most proper way.
All around the world, all companies have made tentative and tests in different ways following the trends of the moment, sometime not very successful or useful, sometimes very well achieved. However, one of the most concrete trends coming out during the weeks was that a simply nice story or a nice image was not sufficient. Facts are counting more than everything else. Moreover (and here we come back to the purpose) if a Brand has a strong reason why, than it needs to align it to concrete actions and bring this value into the present real life.
I have seen many very good entrepreneurial initiatives, where companies small and big, where reinventing themselves in order to act during this crisis and many other just sit and wait. This is where we see how a crisis in a big opportunity to rise up creativity and promotion and to identify where the real values are sitting.
That companies that are able to position with strong and concrete values for their customers and for people will benefit for sure of an advantage when consumers will have to choose and select what to kind of Brand to follow.