A realist’s view on brand comms and marketing in 2021
[Singapore Edition]
When I wrote last year’s annual social media & marketing industry roundup, it closed with four tips for marketers to get through the first quarter. These tips did come from a crisis management perspective, as it just so happened that I had completed a cycle of research on that topic at the time.
Oh boy, little did we know in January how things would shape up in 2020. We all went into always-on crisis mode by February and haven’t really come out since.
I’m sure you will be familiar with the work and impact of the “world’s Chief Transformation Officer”. In light of all that happened, providing any kind of predictions for 2021 seems quite futile, especially after 2020 threw every known marketer’s rulebook out the window.
Instead, what I’d like to do with this year’s January analysis is a reality check for those of us in brand comms and content marketing.
Where do we stand?
What could it all mean?
And what are (some of) our options?
Do keep in mind, this is a realist’s view (a personal account under a topical Singapore lens and by no means exhaustive). If you’re preferring the optimist’s view, Simon Sink might be a better reading fit.
A paradigm shift in marketing
Let’s get right to it and address marketing’s big elephant in the room. With this global crisis every business model is fundamentally challenged. Everything gets questioned and transformation is the only viable option at hand. The function of marketing is no exception and, as a result, the pressure to transform into a profit centre is mounting.
Bear with me as this requires a bit of a detour to wrap our heads around such a paradigm shift in our industry.
Stress testing always-on content
First things first, the infrastructure. Production and creative moving in-house for brands is nothing new. It’s been happening for years. Cutting turnaround time for content, maintaining full control over the messaging and becoming more cost-results efficient has been the battle cry of brand publishing for some time now.
However, the pieces only started falling into place when the circumstances called for applying the always-on approach of performance marketing to content. How else can a brand react to the daily changes that increasingly impact its business?
It has become the modus operandi to stress test every piece of content coming through the approval queue for a multitude of entirely band or product unrelated factors. A checklist that continues to grow each day.
In what situation do people in a brand video have to wear masks?
Which keywords get a Facebook post flagged by the algorithm?
Can interviewees be seen touching their faces on camera?
Ditch the campaign
An always-on content strategy essentially takes away with the industry’s legacy baggage: the campaign. In times of crisis, if brands are seen to only be caring about customers for a period of six weeks or whenever the biannual focus groups are conducted, it clearly comes across as tone deaf to not only customers’ realities, but also those of the people working on such campaigns.
The longterm survival test for any brand lies in the relationship building with customers — the trust factor.
With the ongoing pandemic, this very relationship has become more articulated than ever. Brands are no longer judged by their products and services alone. The public scrutiny in social media groups and internet forums has reached new heights. An organisation’s internal processes, decisions and culture are constantly put under the microscope.
More often than not, discussions easily spin into the misinformation spectrum and grow so pervasive that no amount of publicised data or transparency is able to turn the narrative around.
Again, the comms playbook as we knew it is done and dusted. This is uncharted territory and we all need to figure out how to tackle such narratives. It’s not an IF but WHEN scenario.
Understandably, emotions run high during a crisis. After dealing with the new normal for almost a year, it’s slowly starting to sink in that we’re looking at a never normal reality. That puts increasing strain on people’s psyche.
Misinformation narratives turned ballistic
Something more Singapore brands need to brace themselves for is the fact that these narratives are becoming increasingly ballistic by the week.
The scale of negative sentiments on brand channels has reached a normalisation level previously unheard of. Death threats, that were observed predominantly in Western social media conversations, have started to appear in discussions with Singapore brand context. And employees became direct targets with screenshots of their LinkedIn profiles being circulated on forums and chat groups, together with heaps of misinformation and warped perceptions.
Always-on brand publishing means having content teams churn out stories with a regular daily cadence. Albeit this is a brand’s best shot at countering some of the narratives systematically and promptly, it also means having social media managers deal with a never-ending flood of negativity. At the end of the day, they’re the ones reading all these comments.
After hundreds of comments a day, for 52 weeks in a row, it most definitely starts taking a toll. Bogus narratives begin to make sense and one starts seeing patterns that seemingly confirm perpetuated biases.
The industry has seen a rise in social media community managers and content moderators burnouts — and that was five years ago! Surely it must have spiked to unimaginable levels in 2020.
Mental health support schemes should be a priority for any brand or agency. This is a frontline that’s easily overlooked when the focus is on fixing a crisis through physical measures.
Hot tip: Offering three virtual yoga session for employees does not constitute a mental health support scheme.
The role of content in crisis
While this sounds like a gloomy status report for marketing, there is definitely a silver lining. 2020 has not only seen a shift in how organisations work, but also accented the role of content as connector during a time of physical distancing. Its function of informing and entertaining has been elevated to being an unfading source of communal inspiration and motivation that keeps us going during tough times.
Stories of volunteers at hospitals or swab stations, donating notebooks to low-income families to help them continue their children’s education and take part in exams at home or a hawker lending a helping hand to a customer in need.
All these can be moments of collective bonding. Moments that resonate at a much deeper level than just feeling informed. They help us remain connected to the larger community — its spirit — providing us with a sense of belonging.
It has always been the power of stories to make sense of abstract concepts, establish a communal understanding and derive values from them. Value systems that shape societies and empower humans to overcome crisis.
Three values in particular have taken centre stage in 2020 and will most definitely continue to be drivers for positive developments in 2021: Purpose, sustainability and togetherness.
And I venture that the role of content has already started to expand even further. Not only telling stories about change and change makers, but content that is part of the solution, solving larger societal issues.
This is the ultimate challenge for content creators of our time: Can stories help bring about change and make an impact to real people and real lives?
Offer the right attention investments
No doubt, marketing budgets are going to be slashed in the near future, if they haven’t already. Figuring out how to earn a cost centre’s keep within the company’s bottom line starts with getting people invested in the brand’s content.
The time investment calculation is the actual battle ground of the attention economy. People have a clear concept of time and how to spend it most worthwhile online. This calculation is done within split-seconds when seeing a post on the newsfeed. Scrolling through an infinite amount of content, a 3sec video view is a serious time investment.
And while we’re at it, let’s be honest. The majority of brand content online shouldn’t even be published on social media, let along be produced. A highlights video of a company’s virtual event is just not the most compelling story to tell when customers have the choice to watch dancing nurses teach how to wash hands on TikTok during a mentally straining lockdown period.
That doesn’t mean a white paper or expert panel discussions have no audience. They just haven’t found the right forum or channel with the right packaging yet.
Hot tip: Not every brand message lends itself to trendjacking.
Hot tip 2: Not every post needs to be a meme.
Hot tip 3: No meme becomes more shareable with added corporate colour palette, logo and campaign hashtag, ever.
Ditch ‘spray & pray’ content
Now, where does all this leave us with the revenue centre ask?
By now, it should come as no surprise to anyone that 2021 is going to be tough on businesses, even more so than 2020. We’re nowhere near the end of the pandemic. The digital transformation will continue to disrupt fast and furious throughout all functions. And change will be the only constant in a complex equation of variables that used to be a straightforward funnel.
Similar to tech startups that managed to move into remotely connected areas like financial services or media distribution, any brand can create a new modular business model to expand and build upon existing infrastructures. Or come up with a new business altogether.
2020 has already seen a number of corporate side hustles. Remember that tequila made by an electric car company? It may sound like a joke giving birth to a meme on Twitter, but it sure did sell out instantly when it hit the digital shelves.
Brand partnerships are seen as the new magic wand for sales and marketing, but synergies have to be aligned. All too often a partnership turns out to be an alliance of unequals, with one party paying an unsustainable free-inventory-&-labour-price.
Hot tip: Partnering a tech company is hardly making customers perceive a legacy brand as innovative.
The era of the convenient silo mindsets for marketing has passed.
Moving a pop-up store on Orchard Road to a live-stream on Facebook just won’t cut it anymore. Having an intern experiment with TikTok for eight weeks without a long-term plan to maintain the profile, is simply holding on to a reality that doesn’t exist anymore.
There are tremendous opportunities for brands in live streaming and, of course, on TikTok. The same goes for any other existing or emerging content format and platform. Question is, which is the right marketing formula? A content recipe that inherently augments the core business, enables transformation, and, eventually, spawns a new revenue model in the near future.
Hot tip: Laser focus on one channel and make it work!
Despite all the economic headwinds ahead, 2021 presents itself with an exciting challenge for marketers. The slates are pretty much wiped clean.
Start experimenting!
Sit down with your content production team and product owners and get cooking.
Here’s an old New Year’s resolution that’s worth trying again this year: Stop caring about content that pushes numbers traffic to other content. Create content that builds an audience.
