This year we've weathered a pandemic, riots, double-digit unemployment, a contentious election year, a labor shortage, and now the most expansive fire in California history. If what doesn't kill us makes us stronger, then we should be Ironman by now. It's enough to make you crawl into your cellar and lock the door.
But, we need to pay the bills, harvest the fruit, and sell our wine. With the context and focus of our marketplace changing weekly, what can we do to be culturally sensitive, faithful to our brands, but continue to market our products?
Here, we've assembled our suggestions for addressing your marketing approach during this fall.
Realign your goals, but keep setting them.
Remember back in December when you set your 2020 sales goals? That seems like a long time ago. Many of us started careening off course in March and just let it ride, hoping that we'd adjust when things returned to "normal." By now, we've realized this is "the new" normal, and more importantly, enough time has passed to have directional learnings. It's been six months since COVID first affected our businesses, and hopefully, you've been testing and trying new things to compensate for the lower-than-normal tasting room and on-premise sales. Now is the time to take those preliminary learnings and project them forward for Q4.
This Q4 is going to be 2020's grand finale. In the US, we face a challenging harvest, a very likely resurgence of COVID, school closures, and a presidential election that will compete for attention and drive up costs across every airwave, email, and social media channel. Make sure you take these societal forces into account and lower projections from last year. If we expect consumers to respond similarly this holiday season as they have in the past when not faced with these challenges, we are setting our expectations up for failure.
Critically Review Your Marketing Campaigns
The keyword in 2020 is "pivot," so be continually auditing what you have currently planned, especially any pre-scheduled content.
REVIEW TIMING:
If you're B2B, are there key product launches that aren't critical that you can push into 2021 when your targets have more bandwidth to consider a purchase?
- If you're marketing a wine, think about what buying periods may have shifted. How could consumption patterns change with consumers buying almost exclusively online?
- When might the election possibly drown out your planned programs? For example, if you have a club shipment in early November, what might you need to do to work around the media frenzy?
- Are there any new opportunities? Consumers aren't likely to travel as much this holiday season. Virtual celebrations may create an increased need for sending gifts remotely. How can you position yourself with gift sets or gift cards or virtual holiday ideas to help your customers with this need?
REVIEW MESSAGING:
- Tip #1: Make it about them. Remember, we're all going through this, and things are tough all over. Resist the urge to message your sob story and keep your message firmly about how your brand/wine/product helps the customer. Keep it positive to avoid a perception that you're capitalizing on any misfortunes and talk about benefits. Even if you don't directly help people, your brand can still provide value. How can you inspire, educate, or entertain somebody?
- Tip #2: Make it emotional. We feel before we think, and in times of stress, we look for familiar and trusted brands. The brands that allow themselves to be vulnerable will connect with customers, keep club members, and find their wines under the tree.
- Tip #3: Sell nationally, but be sensitive on a local level. If the south has a hurricane or there are fires in California, or there is an ice storm or COVID flare-up in New England, be sensitive to what your customers are facing in their local environment.
I was surprised at this very tone-deaf and insensitive marketing text I received from Ceasar's last weekend
--- right as most in Northern California were battling fires.