The “New Normal” of Comms Support for Businesses

As the world slowly attempts to regain some semblance of normalcy, many businesses are in the midst of a major self-assessment. For some, returning to a pre-pandemic level of performance is a matter of time and disciplined operations. For others, such a state will simply not be achievable for the foreseeable future. The challenge is first knowing which category you’re in and, if the latter, how to operate efficiently going forward.

Unfortunately, the economic impact of the pandemic cannot be understated. Companies have been forced to eliminate positions and roles throughout their organizations altogether. Still, certain functions must continue to be performed. Support functions such as communications, Human Resources and Information Technology will need to be owned and executed by someone.

Executive teams with little understanding of these roles will likely first attempt to consolidate job duties to fewer resources, sometimes to just one. They will soon find the productivity and quality of work will begin to suffer, something that simply cannot happen when it comes to communications.

Imagine the look and feel of your brand suddenly taking a turn for the worse, more grammatical errors in your email blasts, your social channels going dark. This can all have a self-fulfilling prophetic impact on your business performance altogether. Your customers will detect decline and lose confidence in your ability to deliver. They will go somewhere else, leading to more decline.

Your new marketing & communications strategy will need to take into account more people seeking to minimize their physical interactions with the outside world, even after the virus is vanquished. It will need to have more of a focus on customizing its messaging, as we have shared a massive communal experience, people have felt lumped into a broad global category for far too long. They will be hungry for companies to speak directly to them for once. You will also need to account for the fact that many will not be at their optimal financial strength for some time, the tone of your messaging will need to empathize with this reality. All of these things matter more than ever and cannot be adequately addressed by one or two employees who are also tasked with keeping the communication lights on for your organization.

At JJS, our value proposition has always been the same but it is perhaps more significant during this period :

We will provide your business with the same level of marketing & communications support you would receive from an entire department for a fraction of what a department would cost. We can do this because our consultants have been doing just that for some of the largest brands in the world. Instead of the cost of one person handling internal communications, another spearheading external, another managing executive communications and still another taking care of graphic design, we can do it all at one affordable monthly rate. Perhaps this model is closer to what the “new normal” of marketing & communications support looks like, at least for a little while.

If you are leaning up operations but still need marketing & communications support, we can help.