The spread of COVID-19 in recent weeks is impacting brands in significant ways around the world, challenging both strategies and workstreams across all industries. Frequent cancellations of events one by one served as an initial barometer of the virus’ impact; not just affecting big-name festivals that attract crowds large enough that local economies depend on them, but also smaller activations. The situation begged brands to consider: how can they retain a close connection to key audiences in a time of social distancing?

While the West faces a need to quickly adapt to a new normal prompted by COVID-19, we’re a global creative partner that has serviced clients and areas hit by the virus since its onset in late 2019. Pooling together insights and experiences from teams across the S4Capital family, we’ve put together a report, titled “(Re)Activate Customer Obsession,” that recognizes this moment of upheaval as a profound opportunity for brands to reinvent their strategies and continually reach audiences spread far and wide—perhaps even better than before.

(Re)Define Goals for Customer Obsession

The need for creatively differentiated digital experiences isn’t new; consumer engagement has long migrated toward digital since the rise of ecommerce and social media, with consumers flocking to the convenience and connection enabled by always-on communication and digital personalization.

But for brands that have hesitated to enable these experiences, the trend to social distancing is a wakeup call. “As we come to grips with a world where we can’t shortcut to experience through physical engagement and personal proximity, the challenge is to deliver on the original intent of digital,” says MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar. “Interactive, tactile and personalized moments of magic that create conversation, conversion and commercial opportunities.”

To deliver such experiences, brands must invest in customer obsession. Namely, this means meeting audiences where they are—online—and tailoring resources to better prioritize their needs and enhance the customer experience. For many brands, in-person experiences are critical to cultivating a relationship, building a sense of community and driving emotional connections.

On our blog in the past, we’ve discussed the value of such activations—and the need for a digital layer to connect with audiences faraway. If your brand already has an event plan in place, take this as a moment to consider its goals and how that ladders up into your brand purpose. Our report offers a series of thought-provoking questions to help brands zero in on a digital strategy that aligns with their specific needs.

(Re)Group and Replan

Whether you seek to retain value by pivoting existing plans or are simply struggling to anticipate “what’s next,” our report to reactivating customer obsession offers practical advice on how you can begin to reevaluate and prioritize your goals—and where they fit within digital activations. This is essential not only for brainstorming what new experiences your brand can provide, but makes a critical first step in evolving your operations with the digital skillsets and capabilities needed to deliver them.

Having to face an event’s cancellation is tough, because so much work and preparation had already gone into it. Recognizing this, a move to digital can feel daunting—and you’ll certainly find that strategies must shift, and that what worked for a physical experience may not translate well to a live, digital one. But as we’ve mentioned above, view this unfortunate circumstance as an opportunity to make something even better: a deeper investment in digital, for example, allows brands to build up their data capabilities to better understand which experiences are most impactful, and when.

“One of the things we do is in the data: in social listening and finding the right trigger areas in regions where things are happening,” says Aaron Nava, Director of Digital at Circus, which merged with MediaMonks earlier this year. “From there, we’re able to develop a point of view for brands.” Through increased digital maturity, brands have a greater perspective on how to achieve more meaningful, lasting interaction at different points in the customer decision journey, and become more customer obsessed in the process.

Having a clear sense of purpose is key, too. In-person experiences thrive on inspiring an emotional connection through bringing people together and appealing to the senses, and brands must think carefully about how to inject emotion into digital alternatives.

“Brands shouldn’t aim to think about virtual conferences as replacement of what they had previously scheduled. It’s impossible,” says Kate Richling, CMO at MediaMonks. Still, she notes that you can offer some pretty cool (and in many ways, better) activations that are designed to assist your audience and enrich relationships authentically. Drawing from several example digital activations and scenarios, our report walks readers through what to consider in developing such experiences.

(Re)Imagine What’s Possible

Faced with an immense shift in how they must communicate with consumers over the next few months (and how to pivot back to normal, whatever form that might take), we all stand at a critical moment to reassess strategies. But constraint is beneficial to creativity, and we look forward to tackling more unique brand activations that fundamentally redefine consumer relationships. By taking this moment as an opportunity to hone your digital skills and reimagine what’s possible, your brand will be well-equipped to anticipate consumers’ emerging needs both in the near and distant future.

It’s Time to (Re)Activate Customer Obsession.

Today’s consumer expects relevant, personalized content delivered in the right place at the right time. As they move across channels and devices, it’s essential that brands provide a consistent experience throughout and respond to user engagement from one touchpoint to another. This omnichannel marketing approach is especially beneficial to the travel industry, whose customers are quite literally on a journey that will require calling up information in the most convenient way possible at any given time.

Does your customer need to look up a guide of tourist hotspots without Wi-Fi? How can they best arrange a taxi ride at zero notice, or understand the city’s public transit system? Where’s the best place to eat or sleep when plans have changed? Context is key for travelers’ digital experiences, and brands will need to identify—then fill in—those experiences by delivering content tailored for the best channel to reach consumers in the moment.

A Forrester report about building portfolios of digital experiences points out that apps are essential for brands, but they accomplish little on their own: “New enabling technologies have made conversations, connected devices, web-based experiences, and notifications viable alternatives.” This means brands shouldn’t place all their eggs in one app basket. Instead, they should keep an eye on the emerging tech that’s available, then carefully consider if it can help them provide the content or experience that’s so essential to their customers. Don’t chase the latest tech trend just for the sake of it; instead, start with a key experience or moment in which you can provide a better experience to the customer and what technology best supports that.

Connecting to Consumers with Integrated Activations

In support of its #LifeChangingPlaces campaign, which provides a series of video and audio content that tell the stories of “places that have turned people’s lives upside down,” Lufthansa sought a simple way to inspire a sense of wanderlust and adventures with users. Taking a cue from conversational assistants and the popularity of WhatsApp, the brand and its agency DDB envisioned a mobile assistant that could take users on a journey through one simple, instant interaction. And what better way to radically change their perspective than to begin with their current view?

Powered by Google Cloud Vision, the web app asks users to take a photo of whatever’s in front of them. After, it whimsically offers a travel destination in response to the object photographed. If the user takes a photo of headphones, for example, the assistant will invite them to try hearing something new—like playing bagpipes at the National Bagpipe Centre in Glasgow. It doesn’t just offer destinations, but surfaces up specific experiences they can find there that users may not have considered before.

To make this style of recommendation possible, we worked with DDB to implement a CMS that could connect Google Cloud Vision’s image recognition with the agency’s stellar copy and destinations—including different recommendations based on the same object. The CMS also made it possible for them to import animated flourishes that made the experience more engaging. From there, users are invited to share their destination on their social network of choice or to browse the #LifeChangingPlaces narratives, connecting the tool to the wider content ecosystem.

The app serves as a nice example of how brands—and travel brands in particular—can consider small moments and white spaces along the user journey. The experience fits mobile well because it puts focus on the user’s surroundings: the more varied objects or they see, the better. Activated via mobile web, it doesn’t require users to seek out, download and install an app, either, which is key for snackability and engaging new leads.

Mind the (Digital Experience) Gap

The travel experience is modular, built from a series of experiences and stops along the customer’s (literal) journey. For airlines, this means providing a great experience even before customers board their flight, whether it be their commute to the airport or their wait once there. KLM understood that waiting for a flight can be a real drag—and this wait can make a bad first impression as customers set out on their trip.

The solution? Get customers in the holiday spirit before they board the plane with a series of fun, playable AR effects. Working with KLM, we designed and developed a handful of Facebook Camera effects that incorporate both facial masks and world effects that give travelers a head start by whisking them away to virtual, cartoonish destinations, like a tropical island featuring a groovy, dancing starfish in sunglasses, transforming the airport around them.

Facebook has a strict file size limit for its camera effects to ensure instant, smooth activation on any modern device, so the project required some creative ingenuity to squeeze as much as possible into the experience. The resulting environments, outfits and props are vibrant and irresistible for selfie-lovers, which fits well with the trend of documenting one’s journey—including the idle moments at the airport—and makes a great first impression along the user journey. Travel brands might consider other such moments (like sitting in a cab) to fill in engaging ways that weren’t possible before.

As new technologies emerge, travel brands aren’t the only ones that must continually reconsider how they interact with consumers. While a website and mobile app may have sufficed in the past, expectations of today’s users are rising—and if an organization’s digital maturity doesn’t increase at the same rate, it will lose perceived value. And again, fostering new customer interactions by investing into emerging tech shouldn’t feel like wandering into uncharted territory. Instead, keep your focus on providing value to the customer experience first—your destination—and the best route will emerge.