Marketing Communications During COVID-19
This article is about how marketing managers are keeping communications with their employees during the COVID-19 pandemic by using technology and the internet to keep lines of communication open during this crisis. Everyone is affected by this change and it is making managers to switch from personal to virtual communication. This pandemic is forcing marketing managers to change their methods of information delivery while giving them a base on how to operate in the future.
Craven, Matt. Mysore, Mihir. Singhal, Shubham. And Wilson, Matt. (2020). “COVID-19: Implications for business.” McKinsey Insights.
This article gives a solid overview of the coronavirus epidemic and how it will affect the economy, supply and demand, and business life as a whole. It gives back up information of how it has spread and where it is at now, along with some factors to look for in predicting the future and spread of COVID-19. It then details 2 possible scenarios for the epidemic, with different time frames dependent on global response, that have drastic impacts to the economy outlined for the next 2 years. Following that it discusses how companies should respond to the crisis, including highlighting three essential goals. These goals included balancing the needs of the business with employee and global safety, changing work norms to encourage online and virtual opportunities, and most importantly to increase company communication. Some of the recommendations for response that I found useful was to first and foremost protect your employees. From there it highlighted setting up a cross functional COVID-19 response team composed of people from each division within the company. This team’s sole purpose would be to plan and respond to the Coronavirus outbreak. It also focuses on ensuring liquid assets can weather the storm and stabilizing the supply chain. This source is useful for our blog because it gives insight on problems that managers will face due to the impact of COVID-19.
NAIR, N. (2020). Marketing: Covid-19’S Alarming Impact. Impact: The Marketing & Advertising Weekly, 16(44), 16–18.
The article focuses on the major impact Covid-19 has created and how it has affected the marketing field in great ways. It focuses on the percentages and ways that mainstream companies such as Amazon, Boeing, and Coca-Cola are cutting their ad costs in the midst of the pandemic. The author also includes different countries such as the U.S, India, UK and South Korea to show the percentages on how people will now look at the origin of where they are buying their products from due to Covid-19. Another important part of the article is it gives a table of thirteen categories of products that are most consumed in countries and show how this pandemic has affected the amount of packages purchased. The highest increase in purchases has been cleaning supplies which is up 56%. This article is important because it offers a great amount of intel to see how this pandemic has affected marketing not only in the United States but in many different countries. It gives us a representation of how consumers are currently purchasing products during this time and it shows how much has changed due to the virus. This is useful for our blog because it gives us the financial issues that come along with COVID-19 and how managers must recognize and plan around that.
Cârlescu, B. (2011). The Impact of Video Conferencing on Businesses. Proceedings of the Annual Academic Conference of the Griffiths School of Management, 133–144.
Bogdan Cârlescu, an IT Business Development Manager at RomTelecom, highlights the importance of enterprise collaboration and the pros and cons of switching to a video conferencing system. Cârlescu explains that the switch from traditional in person meetings to teleconferencing could provide businesses with a variety of pros and cons. Benefits include increased productivity, faster decision time, and improved management of dispersed teams, while telecommuting does take away in person interaction. The author highlights these benefits through two case studies done with Astra Asigurari Insurance Company and at the University of Missouri. At Astra Asigurari, they found that being able to meet with 60 members of their international teams at the same time led to, not only, faster time to market and decreased customer wait time, but also better communication with contractors and faster decision-making.
PEÑA, M. (2020). Essential remote-working tips. Administrative Professional Today, 46(5), 4.
The article by Michelle Peña lays out essential remote-working tips to help employees and managers stay in communication through the pandemic. She goes through what is essential for both managers and employees in two different sections of her article. For Managers she lays out 5 important tips that include: explaining what you want, inviting questions, giving employees reasons to why the task is important, and setting specific deadlines. She also gives employees 5 tips to work from home. The tips include curb anxiety, maintain general communication, establish a routine, back up computer files and prioritize exercise. This article will help our blog by including both information about employees and managers during quarantine. It includes information about communicating in the workplace in this pandemic, practicing self-care to not get overwhelmed with all the work you are doing at home, keeping a open communication between management and employee, etc.
Scott, A. H. S. (2013). The People Side of Virtualisation. Annual International Conference on Business Strategy & Organizational Behaviour (BizStrategy), 172–175.
Dr. Albert H. S. Scott, professor at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia in their School of Accounting, Economics, and Finance goes over the possible issues of virtual teams and the components needed for them to run effectively. He highlights six important practices that managers of virtual teams use. He also examples how Information Technology can be used to not only communicate content, but also context across virtual teams. At the end of the article, he goes over the two main issues plaguing virtual teams: trust and group satisfaction and references a study done by Msanjila and Afsarmanesh (2009). This article is useful for the subject of how marketing teams can communicate effectively during the COVID-19 pandemic because virtual teams are a primary component of communication in 2020. This article gives insight about how virtual teams functioned years ago and what aspects of that we can put into place since it is now going to be a primary form of communication for most marketing teams.
Authors: Elaina Rogers, Andrea Scott, Megan Billeter, Mickey Brooks, Trenton Newhouse