This is the defining time to be a marketer

Earlier this week, my company inaugurated its newest class of summer interns, something that we have done each of the past eleven summers. Over Zoom, of course, since this summer is about working virtual, which means the first day isn’t consumed with getting desk assignments, meeting and greeting office mates and having a pizza lunch with the CEO.

No. This is the year of the coronavirus. As an ‘icebreaker’ they were each asked, “If you could live at any time in history, when would it be?” The responses were great and covered the gamut of the normal answers, from ancient times to eras of more modern history, but one stood out. “I would want to live right now, in 2020.”

There is no question that for marketers who want to make a difference, 2020 is the time to do it. We are in the middle of the worst pandemic in a century. A full third of the US and global economy was shut down over a two-month period. And the past few weeks have reignited public awareness of systemic issues of racial injustice and inequality that the US still has neither come to grips with nor solved.

Marketers have never been more needed. So how do you make a difference in times of crises like these? Here are my thoughts:

Be useful; start by listening. During a crisis, marketers need to earn the right to engage their customers and prospects. Uncertainty rules. Fear is everywhere. Trusted leadership and help are elusive. The first way for marketers and brands to be useful is to listen. This is the time to try to understand what people are going through and to validate their fear, pain and uncertainty. Only then can you help them develop realistic paths forward.

Videoconferencing app Zoom, for example, followed this path. Concerns about security and privacy on its platform dominated headlines in April as tens of millions of new users were literally thrown on the platform by schools and businesses going virtual and “zoom-bombing” became a verb. The company listened. It didn’t get defensive. Its founder publicly owned up its failures, and it started fixing them.

Look forward and embrace inevitable change. Crises are times when people can lift their heads up and look forward into the future since so much of their typical day-to-day is lost in disruption. E-commerce, distance learning and food delivery have been growing phenomena for years, but what were once edge-case market challenges are now positioned to be center-case examples of the market today and the foreseeable future.

Analysts estimate that 25,000 retail stores will be permanently closed before 2020 is over, which will upend trillions of dollars of annual consumer expenditures. This will impact virtually every B2B and B2C company in America. Waiting for yesterday to return won’t work for most companies, and marketers need to be sure that their businesses not only have strategies for this future that we have all watched coming over the horizon for more than a decade, but are actually accelerating the adoption of those strategies as the pandemic brings that future to us faster. Look at Tractor Supply. As the country went into lock-down, the farm supplies company accelerated its roll-out of online ordering, curb-side pick-up and same day delivery and has seen sales surge over the past months.

Zero-base your marketing budget. As Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Romer once stated, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” This crisis gives marketers the chance to replace, reduce or reprice some of their legacy marketing tactics that may have been hard to do six months ago for internal political reasons. Marketers can now create new baselines around the value of live sports on TV, or cinema advertising, or out-of-home, now that they had to live without them for months. In some cases, they will invest more in the future. In some cases, less.

A marketer’s job is not easy. Being a marketer in a crisis is even harder. But, for sure, the marketer’s job is never more important than it is during a crisis. I believe that this is the time when marketers can make the biggest difference. What do you think?