Crisis Communication Tips for Food, Beverage, and Travel Brands
As marketing and communications professionals, we understand the importance and need for food, beverage, and travel brands to communicate with their customers in the midst of a crisis—for small to medium-sized food purveyors and manufacturers, the question becomes how can they stay relevant to their audience, provide value to their customers, and keep their sales growing as they navigate the new world normal?
We've weathered our fair share of crises as an agency alongside our clients, so we’ve taken that know-how to compile a few tried-and-true tips to help companies best prepare to navigate their marketing and communications in an ever-changing landscape.
Be transparent and communicative with your audience, in any way you can. While brands should be careful with how they cover topics and announcements that are related to a crisis such as the pandemic, it is important to use owned channels (such as newsletters, websites, and social media) in addition to other channels as appropriate (such as traditional/digital media) to communicate the company’s commitment to safety, their consumers AND their employees.
If your company has implemented particular programs for the health, safety, and physical/mental wellbeing of your employees, tell people. Communicate the safety procedures you are practicing in your manufacturing and logistics, and explain what that looks like to your consumers. From new sanitation policies at warehouses and manufacturers to updates on takeout options at restaurants, consumers are smart and eager to see how their favorite companies are adjusting service to reach them in these strange times.
Be truthful. Now more than ever, it is vital that brands communicate with their audiences in a way that is authentic and honest—your audience will know and care if the information you share, say, and post is true. The trust you build with your audience now will exist long after this crisis is behind us, so take the time now to build it.
Tell your audience the what and why behind the actions your company is taking—if you're using the time to give back to your community and those in need, share the feel-good details. If your business has had to make difficult decisions to weather the storm, explain them with empathy. Now more than ever, people are choosing to support businesses that they feel align with their own beliefs and values, so make sure that your brand is clearly communicating where their values lie.
Invoke your company’s voice and spirit wherever possible. While the world is collectively experiencing hard times (and will continue to be for the foreseeable future), that doesn’t mean your messaging needs to be all doom and gloom. If your brand voice is fun and cheeky, use that! If you celebrate beauty, find ways to celebrate the beauty of the current moment! Now is a time to find ways to engage and celebrate your community, consumers and buyers—this could be with grocery retailers, in partnership with non-profits, influencers, your loyal consumers, and more. Despite everything going on in the world around us, people are still looking to their favorite brands to provide services and entertainment that speak to the current moment. Get as creative as you'd like!
Be proactive and realistic about the future of your business. For many food and beverage companies, the recent global health crisis has offered a glimpse into a future where DTC reigns supreme—and the brands who use that glimpse to tailor their business strategy now are the ones who are setting themselves up for security and success down the line. If your company was not utilizing DTC channels prior to the pandemic, now is an excellent time to heed the requests of your customers and find a way to deliver your product to them directly. If your business was already operating direct to consumer, use this time to build on that strategy. Tell your story on all of your owned channels.
Surprise and delight. Make customers want to keep interacting with your brand and establish loyalty to your product: this could be anything from providing digital resources/recipes, providing creative and exceptional customer service, aiming for speed in shipping—anything to establish the value your company provides, and to allow your audience to feel that by supporting your business, they are a member of a community. Even once the economy begins to reopen, these trends are unlikely to disappear. Prepare now, in a way that ensures you keep customers coming back.
Create an emergency plan. If you didn’t prepare for crisis before, do so now. If this crisis has taught one thing, it's that there's no such thing as overpreparation. Learn from the mistakes and successes you may have seen over the course of the past few months—where did your brand unexpectedly exceed or grow? Where was your company left scrambling to quickly adapt to the new regulations and policies necessitated by the pandemic? Now is a time to future-proof your business by using the learnings of this pandemic to prepare for the next crisis. Create a strategic emergency communications plan now so that you're prepared for any future crises that may come your way.