The world is facing a crisis and businesses have been hit worst. But they have to keep running for the economy to survive and remain intact. Amid lockdown all over the world, operations have been held up, companies are pivoting towards new action plans, restructuring their business models. Among all, one of the most important is what and how they would communicate with people to put their message ahead. Let's discuss what are the challenges and opportunities that lie.

First, companies have a huge task to predict the change in the behavioural patterns and act accordingly. For this, we need to get into the customer's mindset. Well, customers change all the time. Is that change permanent? Might be yes or might be no. Will they be more comfortable in online now? For sure.  Does that take a hit on traditional marketing? Unfortunately Yes.



According to various research surveys, almost 60% of people will be reducing going out. The impact of social distancing is going to stay. Speaking about specific industries, the travel industry will surely get affected for a long time. The Cinema theatre business can go for a toss affecting the other stakeholders involved.  More importantly, consumer priorities will change. People are now more concerned about their health. They are keen to invest time on education, and would be likely to increase their savings.  Similarly, the habit of wearing masks will be there for some time now. Suddenly, hand sanitizers have become the new hot cakes in the market. Well, this may not be a lasting trend, but washing hands will surely become the new norm.  Overall, the spending pattern cycle changes. But some industry veterans feel that human beings are very strange creatures and they will sink back to their very own behaviour gradually. What lies ahead, only time can tell.

Now the question comes, how brands can leverage technology into communicating and marketing more profoundly. A lot of companies are moving to the fundamental value system based marketing.They are focusing on creating amazing content, putting it across various social media channels and levelling up their digital marketing for consumers to look into them. During these times, human-like to be reassured. Brands are leveraging with emotional strings to connect with consumers. The main aim is to build trust which is definitely one of the important gateways to engage with the crowd, but again consumers have to like you to get into consideration stage and it takes many things to bring those consumers from consideration stage to buying stage. On the core part, businesses have to stay real on part of their offerings and services they give. No good marketing campaign can help if their offerings lack in any font. Constantly client relationships are being put to test, and brands who have their values and ethics right will sail through this. Ultimately, if companies stick to provide value to their consumers during these bad times, those same consumers will look after them during the company's bad times.

P.S - Watch out for my next blog for various advertising campaigns being run by brands during the Covid 19.