If you haven’t built a brand pre-COVID, it’s unlikely you’ll build one during COVID.
To capture the new consumer needs during COVID-19, a brand needs to be already trusted and associated with the problems/needs that have opened up.
Building a new consumer brand ground up needs significant investments and brilliant consumer insights. Both currently in scarcity.
Some might argue, COVID-19 presents a fantastic opportunity for companies to build brands efficiently with limited marketing budgets. In normal times, a brands first task is to generate trials. One can argue that in these times of inaccessibility of preferred brands, any one can generate trials easily in high relevance categories (like health and hygiene). Now, the argument continues, if you are able to deliver on product promise, it gets into the consideration set and viola, you have a good business ahead.
My counter to it is that people buy into a brand, trying out a product due to access or value, which a dozen other products can give during these times, is just not the same. And in these tough times, if you fall short of a promise, you can kiss the consumer goodbye for the rest of his life. If you are a corporate brand, the risk is even huge.
While brands can be very well built in these times, it is tougher to build them during times of crisis and not the other way around. Far more careful thought needs to go into it.
In any case, a paper from AC Nielsen’s RMS team says that if you ramp up distribution rapidly in traditional retail environment during launch month/period, all it takes is about 3 months from launch to tell if a product will be successful going forward. So, by the end of the year, we’ll know which product launches are flop shows and which have clicked.
I hope to be proven wrong.
