Now more than ever, companies across the world, irrespective of industry, have their business operations and its ability for continuousoperation threatened during this pandemic. The most imminent threats are the loss of clients, a decrease in sales, and the loss of jobs.
Operating during a pandemic is incredibly strenuous on any business, and whilst one cannot avoid all possible detrimental effects of COVID-19, entities can certainly adapt policies and operations in order to mitigate the risk of exposure to these threats against the business.
This article aims to address ways in which you can adapt the marketing strategy of your business to be in line with the pandemic in order to minimise risk of adverse impacts on the business.
How will changing the marketing policy of your business mitigate risk faced?
A changing world means a changing market, and as markets change, consumer interaction with the market changes too. One key principle in marketing that does not change however is understanding consumer behaviour.
Understanding consumer behaviour, especially their spending patterns, is crucial before moulding policies in order to get consumers to interact in favour of your product in the market. By developing policies in line with their behaviour, you are effectively mitigating the risk of being severely caught up in the looming recession.
A starting point in understanding consumer behaviour is to first understand the effects of a pandemic on business operations.
Pandemic versus Economy
As economies come to a halt in the first few weeks of lockdown, many consumers decrease consumption drastically with the bulk of spending being on essential goods/services only. This coupled with government rules and regulations regarding a lockdown means that consumers are also limited by law on what they can spend their money on.
A larger economic problem is that given rational consumer behaviour and the assumption of consumer knowledge, many would anticipate a recession looming in the forthcoming months that could last for the foreseeable future. The expectation of this information is that consumers would cut back spending on everything except for what is essential – and now the problem for your business begins to present itself.
How do you make sure your product isn’t cut off from the consumers budgets? To answer this, you need to examine the factors that make your product attractive to the consumer, and more importantly – demonstrate consumer need rather than want for your product.
Questions to consider when adapting your marketing strategy
- Are the current marketing channels efficient in the environment of a lockdown?
- Is your product still affordable to consumers given their new restricted budgets?
- Does your product meet the criteria for being essential to the consumer?
- Does the market for your product still exist during a pandemic?
- Should your product be performing poorly in the market, what can you change to penetrate the market once again?
Emphasizing the first question, it is worthwhile to reconsider the current marketing strategy in place. Bearing in mind that consumers are now in lockdown, stuck at home, and many spend much larger proportions of their time on social media and the internet, investing into routine forms of advertising (e.g. Billboards, radio stations) might be better spent on platforms that consumers are currently spending most of their time.
Cost implications
Whilst trying to combat the pandemic via strategy changes, there is a factor that is a determinant of all outcomes, i.e. time constraint. Remember, should your sales go down, the business loses clients, and product lines perform poorly in the markets, the operating ability of the entity becomes severely affected. The biggest challenge then becomes your business being able to sustain itself, and its ability to keep your employees on payroll.
Changing marketing strategies is rarely cheap. Especially in cases where entire product lines/brand strategies need to be restructured in order to have a chance for survival. In order to be able to finance these kind of business operations, you will also need to ensure that the benefits of any amendments to your strategy can exceed the costs to the business in the long run.
The culmination of the findings above yields the conclusion that you need to examine where your product stands in the rankings of consumers budgets on essential good/services during a pandemic. This is crucial in order to strategically evaluate a plan of action to ensure that the risk of your business experiencing market failure is minimized.
All this while bearing in mind the time constraint and urgency of adapting your marketing strategy to the pandemic implies that it is critical that your business adapts fast to the changes in the environment associated with the pandemic, else your business is exposed to the risk of getting left behind.