Last night, in response to the Corona Virus sweeping the globe, Governor Steve Sisolak shut down the state of Nevada. And in doing so, he said perhaps the most profound statement that any marketer can hear right now.
“Find a way to service your customers through delivery, drive through, curbside pickup or front door pickup, or close your doors.”
To catch up everyone who hasn’t been living on planet earth, a rampant disease called COVID-19 has changed the lives of virtually every human on the globe. Public gatherings are no more, businesses exist virtually or not at all, and literally everyone is either sick (thankfully a small portion with a high recovery rate) or is sitting in their homes seemingly waiting for this whole thing to pass, like a hurricane moving at the speed of a cartoon tortoise.
So Sisolak, like many Governors across the U.S., has given Nevada businesses an ultimatum:
“Find a way to service your customers through delivery, drive through, curbside pickup or front door pickup, or close your doors.”
While that’s a big statement for Corona Virus, I’ll argue the marketing industry has been painfully tackling this exact statement for years. In fact, if Sisolak had just added the word “online” to his list, this sentence could have been the big punch for any keynote presentation at any marketing conference in the country in the past five years.
It’s not new. It’s just the first time it has to be now.
We live in a fast-paced world, and demand has changed. Consumers value speed and convenience as much as quality and cost. It’s the reason why Amazon accounts for 5% of literally all retail in the U.S., why on-demand television is seeing double-digit growth year-over-year, and why almost every fast-food restaurant and fine dining establishment has reluctantly partnered with food delivery services.
Why, then, is the idea of a world going exclusively virtual and on-the-go such a challenge for so many businesses today? It’s because change is hard.
None of this is new to the business world, nor the marketing world, but many many businesses are still being caught off guard. Maybe they thought they had more time to adapt, or maybe they thought these new trends were just fads that would go away.
Maybe they were just completely blind to the need for change, though I somehow don’t think that’s it.
Like I said, change is hard, and in most cases I’ve worked with, that challenge is the biggest barrier businesses face. One way or another, though, Corona Virus has forced the hand of every business out there. For the first time ever, adapting for the sake of growth has really become adapting for the sake of survival.
Marketers need to lead the charge.
As marketers, it’s up to us to push the envelope and force our businesses, our clients, to adapt and grow into the solutions providers their customers ultimately want. And that level of solution extends beyond goods and services, and into things like speed, delivery options, ease of obtainment…basically everything necessary to fit into to the lives of the consumer.
Fitting into the lives of the consumer. If that phrase sounds familiar, it’s because that’s what marketers have had to do with virtually all forms of mass communication over the past several decades. We no longer ‘just put up ads’, but instead target across mediums, build funnels, create messaging around each funnel phase, and work to deliver a balance of awareness, persistence and under-bearing (is that the antonym of overbearing? Not sure).
What I think a lot of marketers forget is that our expertise extends beyond mass comm. We’re not just the promotions people, but the reinvent-how-we-do-business people. And I think there’s still a lot of opportunity to remind businesses that that’s what we do.
Marketers are more relevant now, than ever.
Marketers are always relevant because we possess the uncanny ability to imagine different ways of doing things.
It’s the reason marketers are leading the charge in the telehealth industry.
It’s the reason marketers are suggesting online contests more than in-store giveaways, even for brick and mortar businesses.
It’s the reason the marketing team at Wendy’s decided to devote their energy into a 100-page Dungeons and Dragons campaign (complete with NPC Wendy and a Ronald McDonald boss fight!).
Right now, every marketer is being challenged to help reinvent the business world. And we have the expertise to do it.
We live in a different world.
We live in a different world today. Different from three months ago, and different from three years ago too. Let me touch real fast on the latter.
Just a few years ago, we were telling brick-and-mortar businesses that they needed to be selling online in order to keep the doors open. But just the other day I read a great story about an e-commerce tea business that grew and eventually opened a sit-down tea shop.
Wait a minute, isn’t that backward?
Yes, it’s exactly backward. We’ve flip-flopped, creating online businesses that evolve into storefronts instead of the other way around. And that’s because we live in a different world than before.
Why is the tea shop relevant? Because that’s the business model that just a few years ago seemed crazy, just a few months ago seemed innovative, and today feels like a necessity more than ever.
As marketers, it’s up to us to get that through to our clients, and help them navigate the process. Many people we work with have been waiting patiently for innovation to die off, but today we’re seeing that it’s here to stay out of necessity.
Who’s winning and why?
Not everyone’s losing during the Corona Virus fiasco. Zoom’s stock is actually up, and everyone from my clients to my toddlers suddenly have an abundance of Zoom Meetings scheduled on their calendars.
Food delivery is also in high demand right now, with almost every third-party delivery option bringing takeout food to everyone who’s already sick of their ramen stashes.
Yesterday, MailChimp was in so much demand that some colleagues and I couldn’t even send out a test email (sorry, I don’t have an article to link to for this one). But my immediate takeaway from this, every business was trying to communicate to their customers, and rightly so.
And even Dropkick Murphys, an American Celtic punk band, managed to bring their annual St. Patrick’s Day show to the masses through Facebook Live, during a time when most people practically forgot it was St. Patrick’s Day.
It’s important to note that some of these aren’t about making money. But as marketers, we’re in the business of maintaining relevance. Not every marketing moment is about converting to a sale, but instead is about getting the consumer to engage with our business. It’s not about selling, but maintaining awareness, so they think of us when they are finally ready to buy.
All of these examples are about businesses taking advantage of the situation, finding and filling a need, and maintaining relevance. In other words, they’re all doing marketing.
Who’s losing?
As a Las Vegas local, I feel it’s important to touch on a major industry taking a hit right now – the Las Vegas Strip. Nevada’s casinos have been shut down, and even Cirque du Soleil has closed its offices.
In a world where consumers are more willing than ever to consume media through the Internet, and online casino gaming is on the rise, I have to ask how the Entertainment Capital of the World could look at the closing of brick and mortar as an immediate need to temporarily call it quits.
The answer I come back to is the one above. Change is hard. And marketers, it’s our job to help ease that pain. In a world where consumers are less interested in brick-and-mortar than ever, every business needs to know how to survive without it.
What can we do?
Let’s go back to Marketing 101. Marketers create markets – we bring together buyers and sellers. And we do that by creating opportunities.
Right now, our buyers are in a different mindset than a month ago. They’re also in a different physical location, and things aren’t going back to normal any time soon.
If we have a client who’s struggling, we have the power to brainstorm innovation for them. Maybe it’s about e-commerce transitions, or maybe it’s just content development so they maintain relevance. Maybe it’s advising how to re-bundle their products, or create streamlined processes for work-from-home, virtual, or even delivery options. Or maybe it is a mass comm strategy that takes into account the fact that the whole audience is sitting at home right now.
So what can we do? Well, a lot, actually.
We can send out surveys to engage with our clients’ customers and learn more about their lives right now.
We can create webinars and virtual events for our clients to transition their services or just keep their audience engaged.
We can guide our clients through the development of new creative and media campaigns that are relevant to a post-Corona marketing world.
Bottom line, we can imagine and help execute the appropriate next steps for businesses.
And the great thing? This is already the trend! With so many marketers pushing for a transition to virtual and on-the-go for so many years, we already have the experience and resources necessary to make this all happen.
It’s adapt-or-die time.
Like I said, none of this is new, it’s just now a necessity for the first time ever. As marketers, we’ve had myriad clients push back on our attempts to help them upgrade. But now businesses don’t have a choice – they need to adapt now.
“Find a way to service your customers through delivery, drive through, [online,] curbside pickup or front door pickup, or close your doors.”
This is exactly the mantra that every business has been facing for years, and Corona Virus has finally forced marketing’s hand. It’s up to us to help businesses transition into something that can survive the new business landscape.
I want to help.
I’m not sure if anyone’s read this far, but if you have, I want to help. I’ve been working in marketing and market research for 15 years, and in that time I’ve learned something very vital: there’s a solution out there to every challenge.
If you have a challenge right now, give me a call and let’s brainstorm a solution. Seriously. My cell phone number is 702-494-8936, and if you’re reading this feel free to shoot me a text message right now. No charge, nothing like that – I just want to hear your Corona Virus-related business challenge, and help you brainstorm next steps.
The same goes for my marketing friends and clients. If you want some extra support in these challenging times, shoot me a text or an email, let’s set up a time, and we’ll work together to brainstorm the right next steps.
Change is hard, but it’s adapt-or-die time. I encourage all marketers out there to help this final round of businesses evolve into a modern marketing world. We can do this, together!