Marketing messages are changing fast this year. What was considered a good line to communicate to your market a couple months back is now terribly out of vogue. The new words to use may be out of style before you can build your next campaign. If you are in charge of marketing at your business, what can you do when things are changing so rapidly?

The marketing message you were using back in March is now outdated. When many businesses closed, or at least slowed down, due to the health crisis, marketers shifted their direct sales approach to a more caring tone. They tried to appeal to the human side of people and build brand equity. There were a lot of messages that sounded like advice from a mother to a child who just fell off their bicycle: Stay home, stay safe. Take some time to regroup. We’re all in this together. Those marketing messages are old news now. Why? For one, people were overwhelmed with so much of it from every angle that they became tone deaf to the message. But the winds of public sentiment have long blown away and given way to a new tone. The new tone has shifted to a much more nasty snarl, one of which your mother wouldn’t approve! Wear a mask or you’ll kill people! Stop wearing a mask, you stupid #*@!, Silence is Hate, Speaking is Hate, Stop the Hate! Are any of you a little reluctant to say or do anything on behalf of your business these days? We are way past the caring phase of 2020. We are well into the fire-and-gasoline part of the year.

This is a marketing blog, so I am going to approach the social awareness aspect of what is happening in the marketplace right now from that perspective and not one of politics. What happens in social awareness can impact your marketing in a big way. Outrage can turn to protest against your brand very quickly. Good marketers keep tabs on what their customers are thinking. When the winds of change start to shift public opinion, you need to take note of how the demographic you are targeting is reacting to it. When doing so, it is very important to understand the difference between Attitudes and Values. Attitudes change when public sentiment changes as opposed to values, which are strongly held beliefs that rarely change throughout ones life. When you are making a marketing statement about changing attitudes, you can do so in line with what most of your customers are thinking and you can be pretty much assured it will not cause your brand any problems. But when you make a statement in your marketing about values that go against what your customers believe, you are asking for big time problems. What is happening in our culture right now is a challenge to values. That is why there is so much uproar and it is also why you will have a hard time putting a cohesive marketing message together without getting in trouble with one group or the other.

What should you do? First, don’t get caught in the explosive rhetoric. Don’t get painted into a corner by endorsing an agenda that could damage your brand on down the line. There will be a time to speak up, if you choose to do so as a business, but it is not until cooler heads prevail. Second, understand what you believe and what your brand stands for. If you have not thought this through, do so now. There are plenty of examples of corporate brands that wrap themselves in a particular worldview that is communicated in their marketing. For instance, Starbucks and Hobby Lobby have very different corporate worldviews that have shaped their brands. This appeals to some and turns off others, but you don’t have to guess where they stand on certain social issues. Third, get into the heads of your target market. Attitudes are easy to figure out, but values sometimes are not. They take more time, but it is imperative that you understand your customers and those who you are targeting for new customers. It will help you avoid the marketing message of the month conundrum. It will also help you not to violate the values of your customer base. Wrap your marketing message in these things and you will have success.