Last Friday, I delivered a webinar I’d been asked to host based on some of the content McKim has been sharing in the last six weeks. It came at an interesting time. My strategic team and I had been talking about the many purpose-based brand projects we’d been working on in the past several months. Building brands with power and purpose has become an area of focus for McKim. We wondered if that lens could be used to analyze successful and less successful brand pivots we’d seen.
Preparing the presentation was an interesting exercise in the analysis of how marketers and agencies have been responding to the pandemic. Like you, I’ve never had the opportunity to witness a response to a pandemic other than in the movies. Personally, I feel that my own response was nowhere near as heroic as Kate Winslet’s but it was perhaps somewhat better than Jude Law’s. Enough about me.
Interestingly, you can pretty much track the progress of fear and anxiety by the kinds of ads that have been sent into the market week by week. And there’s a clear, common theme among the brands that were able to pivot quickly, effectively and be bang-on-relevant to their customers. For those brands, it wasn’t about selling. It was about something else.
“Hey. You made the right choice by choosing us. Let’s make the world better together.”
— Brands that did it right in the pandemic.
As you can see from the examples in the presentation, building brands with power and purpose enables you to respond quickly in a crisis and still come across as genuine and believable. Even more importantly, your purpose can guide how your organization treats employees, customers and the communities where you do business.
The ideas put forward in the webinar are at the core of our business at McKim. If you’re interested in those ideas, fill out the form below. I’ll reach out personally and start the conversation.
Be well.
