Protect Your Brand Reputation: Avoid the Risks of Insensitive Marketing in a Crisis.
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, safeguarding your brand reputation is paramount. It represents the culmination of countless creative and strategic efforts. Before deciding on a launch date, make sure that no other events, such as major industry events, product launches by other companies in space, or national or religious holidays, will overshadow yours.
Navigating the marketing landscape becomes challenging during unpleasant events, necessitating a departure from standard business processes in order to embrace humanity and empathy. Balancing brand relevance during crises like natural disasters, wars, and terrorist attacks is critical. Although it may appear unrelated, pausing to consider the larger context is critical.
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Whether it’s a candy subscription box during a distant war or Instagram recipes during national tragedies, understanding the implications and responding with empathy is critical. During such times, tailoring your brand’s response to be consistent with its mission, vision, and values is important.
Pause and assess the situation
As soon as you become aware of the crisis, it is recommended you pause ongoing campaigns to assess the situation, even if it has nothing to do with your people, brand or industry.
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You’ve likely observed adverse remarks on social media under posts from brands reluctant to withdraw campaigns. For example, a shoe brand may share a design seemingly directed at a specific group, triggering a flood of comments condemning the brand’s priorities.
Once these comments start, more people join in, tagging friends and escalating the situation. Handling such a situation becomes increasingly challenging, and taking actions like deleting, creating a banned words list, or blocking trolls can exacerbate the problem.
Instead, swiftly review planned content, ads, and social media posts to ensure their appropriateness in the current situation. Remember that the public is highly sensitive during such times, making any form of marketing susceptible to being perceived as insensitive, potentially harming your brand reputation.
Read more: The Power of Google Business Profile
Show empathy and sensitivity
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Discuss with your team how to adopt a tone that conveys empathy and sensitivity. This is not the time to share memes or make aggressive business pitches. See whether your brand can rapidly acknowledge the incident online to show that it cares.
This can range from a short change in the company’s profile picture to a brief social media update stating that your thoughts are with the victims of this awful occurrence and that you are now looking into ways to directly express assistance.
Strategic Communication For Brand Reputation
During a crisis, exercise heightened caution in communications by reorienting your messaging away from the product or service, and instead, accentuate the core values of your brand in relation to the situation. Emphasize aspects such as community support, resilience, and compassion.
Image by: Ivan Nadaski
Concurrently, reinforce this message by actively extending support in a manner aligned with your brand identity, be it through donations, distributing care packages, or offering a curated list of crisis-related resources beneficial for your audience. This proactive approach demonstrates genuine care and commitment from your company.
Prioritize internal team support in addition to external actions as the event’s influence grows. Ensure that messages do not provoke sensitivities among individuals affected by the circumstance.
Read more: Social Media Psychology: Why We Follow and Share Interesting Content?
Image by: Delmaine Donson
During a crisis, it’s vital to refrain from the usual marketing approach of seizing on pop culture moments, as any perceived insincerity can lead to backlash, jeopardizing years of reputation building. Instead, focus on attentive listening and responsive actions, either through direct communication or strategic pivots to address audience challenges.
The long-term consequences of your decisions will heavily influence brand sentiment, but a well-executed response has the potential to strengthen the brand over time.
Don’t let your brand face unnecessary risks. Reach out to us at halo@krona.id to initiate a conversation about how we can collaborate for a resilient and build brand’s reputation marketing strategy.
