During the first month of the sanitary crisis that spread to the United States and Europe in March 2020 a couple of month after the China crisis had unfolded, academic writing in Marketing communication was ignoring the existence of the pandemic. Most students when writing and working out strategies, messages and creative material ignored the impact of the viral pandemic on the way humans in most of the world were and would be in larger and larger numbers being impacted. After a few weeks of sheltering in place in most large cities around the world, while the world was coming to terms with the health and sanitary impact of the crisis on human relations and on the world economy, the students still did not shift their mindset to new realities of the present altered state of societies and the future state post crisis.
Today a month and a half into the crisis as Italy starts to potentially see the crest of the devastation, China slowly getting out of strict confinement, however with still and 70% of the world in confinement, things are starting to change. Certain sectors of the economy are devastated, such as restaurants and bars, world travel as a quasy-standstill, and records unemployment and world economies shrinking due to all but essential industries shut down, it is getting very difficult to ignore the realities that “something” is happening that will have a long term impact on society.
There are some interesting trends that have appeared, such as a passion for Sour Bread craze and its backlash with what became known as the sourdough war https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/sourdough-wars-spark-quarantine-baking . The Dalgona coffee craze https://www.perfectdailygrind.com/2020/04/exploring-the-dalgona-coffee-craze/ , or the once predicted now realized success of TikTok https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/style/what-is-tik-tok.html .
There are some very strange trends that one could maybe not have predicted. These include a reality show covered in this blog my McKenzie http://buytheway.ascjclass.org/have-you-heard-about-the-tiger-king/ based around the feud between Big Cat farm owners in Middle America on Netflix that should have been originally something denouncing the excesses of few neurotic extravagant but became viral. The strange run on toilet paper worldwide that eventually became violent in Australia (OK that might have been predictable) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-toiletpaper-austra/australian-police-charge-two-sydney-women-over-toilet-paper-feud-idUSKBN20V00P .
Janet Bralis in the Harvard Business Review of April 6, 2020. https://hbr.org/2020/04/brand-marketing-through-the-coronavirus-crisis has some good advice on how to approach brand marketing during this troubled time. But the most important part that I saw was that at the end of the article she mentions that one needs to have a plan for the “next and the beyond”. The next is what is happening now, today, tomorrow as things evolve extremely fast. The effect of social distancing on shopping, the impact on supply chains due to panic buying, the effect of unemployment and decreased disposable income, the number of deaths and their impact on society and the reality of those left without their close family members or friends, the effect on mental health of sheltering in place of people now stuck together 24/7 or stuck completely alone and on more positive note the reduction in pollution worldwide, the return of many wild spices now that we have less cars, ships and Airplanes around. This is what is happening right now and what is “next” every day, as marketers we need to be able to respond to those. But we also need to anticipate the “beyond”. Beyond is beyond the sanitary crisis. How will the world have changed, will the behaviors change or will we all return to exactly the same behaviors as before which behaviors will have changed forever and which ones will return to or close to the ones prior to the crisis? Will the crisis have an impact to the very structure of our societies due to the way people will have been changed by a long period of confinement and potentially economic hardship? These are important aspect that we need to keep in mind, investigate, research and potentially all marketers need to become futurists to a certain extend. This future is not very far, it might be this summer or a bit later, but it is not in 10 years. Next is now, beyond is very close.
3 Responses to Next is now, Beyond is close.