Our pandemic is unprecedented in modern history, there is nobody alive that remembers the Spanish Flu of 1918. Now is the time to be an inspirational brand. Nike has been telling people to play at home. MacDonalds has been reminding people that even when everything changes, some things, like a happy meal, never change. These brands are becoming more trusted by offering a sense of stability many of our civic institutions do not. They are repositioning themselves in the battle for relevance for the opportunities presented by the crisis. They are promoting calming, reassuring messages across media platforms, using strategic imagery to instill confidence and calm in their customer base. 

It’s important to understand a few things before planning. First, even when there is a vaccine, it won’t have an economic uplift until widespread adoption, enough to grant herd immunity or allow people to feel safe. With this virus, we don’t know the herd immunity number but it will be at least 70%, and if it’s like mumps, we might need closer to +90% of the population to be vaccinated to be safe. If it’s the lower number, we will need 230 million people vaccinated, with all of the production and logistics hurdles that presents. Even if there is a vaccine as early as this fall, it will take many months for manufacturing, distribution and administration to take place. We should be planning on this. The lack of testing, the lack of centralized management for testing resources, and the politicization of testing means we should plan on testing being narrowly applied for the foreseeable future, resulting in people feeling little security.  The current social and economic paradigm will be the normal for awhile. Even if the Executive Order to stay home is lifted, people will not be going out and doing business until they feel safe. Economic behavior is going to be primarily influenced by how people feel, much more so than in the past. Personal safety is what everybody will be paying attention to.

Another noteworthy data point, a large Gartner survey found consumers to be very, very sensitive to brands that they perceive to be taking advantage of the crisis, or placing profits over people’s safety. It’s important to note that this is how people feel, even if there is not consistency to those feelings (I’m sure almost all of the survey respondents have used Amazon for something in the last two months). This reinforces that the feelings of our customers and clients is going to be a prime operator for informing their behavior, more so than hard data. 

Since so many of us are home right now, most clients and customers will be engaging with your company digitally. The imagery of your company on the internet is the literal image of your company. How do you feel about it? Is it accurate? Is it flattering? The economic stresses of Coronavirus are forcing many owners to question what they know about their business, and in many cases we are having to retool for a different economy and different society moving forward. To keep and find customers, you need to share with them the pivots and changes you’re making, to show them these changes, not just tell them. We need to do the things needed to make them feel safe. 

Before you start all the messaging on all the platforms and taking photos to share, first steps should be to determine what is the important business-as-usual activities you’ll be doing, and what are the important parts of your business that changing. When you’ve got this figured out, then it’ll be fairly straightforward on what needs to be shared with your clients. If you’re a landscaping company, clients need to know that you can still come, shape their yards and clip their grass and leave without any contact (and for good measure all of your staff will be wearing masks in case of inadvertent contact). There are a number of messaging priorities- use of PPE, business as usual, and letting customers know that you’re thinking about their safety before profit. Because oh yeah, that’s a big thing right now. If people feel like you’re holding profit over their safety, then you’ll lose all of their trust in your brand, and the brand experiences and marketing that we do now is going to set the tone for our companies and our communities moving forwards. What we do now we will have to live with. 

Once you know what the critical messaging is, you need to determine which mediums are going to be used to diffuse it. This is important, because a good photograph or video is only good depending on where people see it. For example, if it’s a photograph of an employee cleaning a box and the person is small in the image, then the box is not very large, and if the image is being seen on a smartphone, the box is going to be tiny, it won’t be as easy to see, or have much message impact. The medium is the message, if the screen in small, then your subject needs to be big, and if your medium is large (a tv, or magazine) then you have more flexibility to make your subject smaller with more context surrounding it. 

A brief note about tools: your cell phone camera, or the cell phone camera of your employees is just fine right now. Pandemic means good enough is what we are all doing while distanced or shut down. A mediocre to bad cell phone photograph of what you’re doing and how you are doing it is better than no imaging at all. 

Uncertainty is the tenor of our time, messaging to your clients is critical to be relevant, especially when so many people are working from home, and we don’t have the formal or informal personal contact that so many businesses rely on. I’m not sure about everybody else, but I get far more email newsletters than I once did, and all of them are the same sea of text, with links to blog posts and webinars to help me, one way or another. If you can narrow in on your messaging, take some photographs to diffuse that message, our clients and employees will be grateful. Seeing is believing, and in these uncertain times, most of want to believe in something. Even better if that belief is in your company.