Marketing during a lockdown provides reassurance through support and communication. Brands that market when it’s tough, come out stronger.
These are crazy times. There’s a lot of uncertainty for individuals and businesses alike. The one thing we can do to reassure everybody is to communicate. Whether that is family, the community, clients and customers, we need to communicate many things in times like these. Now more than ever is the time to feed into those channels of communication we have built up, rather than let them dry up.
If we look at past learnings from global recessions, brands that maintained their marketing during a lockdown or other tough times are the brands that came out on top. If you are marketing when most of your competition is not, you have the opportunity for a very high cut through. You can stand out and be front of mind for consumers when they decide to make that spending decision. Another advantage to marketing now is that you inherently show your audience you are a strong, stable and reliable company.
Amazon
An example of a brand that continued to market during times of unease, and came out on top because of it is Amazon. In the 2008 global recession Amazon continued to invest in marketing and product development. They innovated their famous kindles and increased the companies overall sales by 28% in 2009. Although the natural inclination for advertisers is to cut back on advertising during a recession, those brands that maintain their ad budget and/or change their messaging can get a long-lasting boost in sales and market share.
Domino’s
Domino’s pizza wasn’t the favourite pizza chain when the recession hit. However, the pizza giant wasn’t ready to give in to its competitors. In 2009, Domino’s announced that it was changing its signature pizza recipe somewhat dramatically. They would plan on spending millions of dollars on research and a new marketing campaign to raise awareness. Despite fears of a “New Coke”-style failure, the new pizza was a massive success, and drove up both sales and profits for the company.
Lego
When you think about families cutting costs to save money during times of economic struggle, you’d imagine plastic building toys to be at the top of the list of expendable luxuries. Yet, while most companies were scrambling to survive, Lego saw profit growth of more than 63 percent. Because of this they reached an all-time high of profitability. Why? There are a few reasons. The most important was expansion into the global market. While Americans were facing the worst of the recession, Lego expanded into Asia and made concentrated efforts to build sales in Europe.
As the old saying goes – “When times are good you should advertise. When times are bad you must advertise”. We are here to support you in anyway we can. We come up with innovative solutions and campaigns to help you market your business over this time. Contact us today to discuss your concerns or worries.
Let’s work this out together.
