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 brands must be more agile than ever. For one, there’s the need to produce always-on, personalized content at scale to continually engage audiences with relevance. Add to that the many different touchpoints that marketeers must support with a consistent and coherent brand image, and it’s clear that they face a real need in developing more efficient ways of working internally or collaborating with external partners.

Many have found success with the SCRUM process. Originally a product development teamwork strategy, it has since inspired ways of working on a variety of tasks, including creative. Its popularity is in its agile process designed for adaptive problem-solving, in which projects are broken down into a series of short-term tasks (called “sprints”) to be completed within a month or quicker. This process enables teams to frequently assess mistakes to avoid in the future, continually optimize processes and switch gears at a moment’s notice when new needs arise.

SCRUM is a popular agile method, but it’s not the only one. In fact, at MediaMonks we operate in a structure that we call Accountable Agile, in which trust is placed at the fore of the relationship. It combines the best from a handful of processes like SCRUM and Waterfall to provide some added flexibility to how we work alongside brands. And the “accountable” in Accountable Agile isn’t just lip service; it guarantees we can provide the highest-quality product to brands by operating within the model that works best for them. Below are some of the considerations we take to ensure smooth, efficient operations and quality of service.

Set the Pace That Benefits Your Organization

Some organizations hear about the agile process and think that it means they can quickly innovate by supporting any new idea on short notice—but this approach is messy, if not unsuccessful, and isn’t at all what agile is about. While the agile process is designed to help organizations become more flexible, its success ironically results from its heavily organized and strategic structure, requiring organizations take some steps to prepare themselves for agile collaboration.

The process must begin by first identifying where your organization currently stands in its resources and organizational structure, which helps your partner begin planning how to best organize teams that fit. Take supermarket chain Jumbo for instance: its website and apps were handled by different teams, with only the website being supported in-house. As they sought to unify both environments in-house, we helped support by integrating UX and design team members directly into their development operations.

We organized efforts to make the most efficient use of resources while Jumbo scaled up their IT team. At first, the UX and design teams operated within their own silo to service all digital solutions. As the in-house team grew, we began transitioning UX and design into dedicated, multidisciplinary teams. The lockstep approach shows how brands can evolve their operations at their own pace.

On that note, brands that are just beginning to embrace an agile process must also consider how the initiative will integrate and work with other sides of the organization. Business Monk Joeri Lambert notes that “The rest of the organization may not be thinking agile yet,” and seeking approval from stakeholders across the organization—marketing, sales, operations and more—risks slowing down the overall process. That’s why Lambert says it is essential to have a project manager within your organization who has the power to approve within the sprint system.

Embrace the Iterative Process

So now that you know how a partner can help your team grow into an agile process, what about the flip side of the equation—how does it actually build upon a creative idea or business need? The sprint-based agile process is well equipped to iterate upon ideas, or even reorient into another direction by taking learnings from a post-mortem review.

Jumbo has a sizeable selection of wine and beer—so much that the supermarket’s customers could easily feel overwhelmed if they’re unsure what would pair with tonight’s dinner or fit their tastes. Jumbo wanted us to produce a beer and wine finder that would recommend a selection of drinks based on users’ responses to a handful of simple questions. Our UX and design personnel worked within their teams to produce the questionnaire.

But the process didn’t end upon the questionnaire’s completion; it was only the first level. We knew that the tool could become more personalized based on whether the user was a novice or an aficionado, changing the questions based on initial responses. For example, you might ask a novice whether they prefer something fruity or dry—but a seasoned wine drinker might have more specific tastes. “This was too advanced to implement in the first step,” says Lambert, “so we gave everyone a taste of it, and slowly grew towards a more advanced method of questioning.” This is a process that we call “zero-to-one”: rather than boil the ocean with a level-10 experience, we start small to yield quick results for brands, which they can then use to gain buy-in and ladder up to larger, longer-term goals.

Just like with scaling up operations, iterating and improving upon a creative idea requires your partner to really understand and identify the goals you have in mind through your agile efforts. This requires close, continual alignment between parties. “To set up such a project, you need to onboard someone with more expertise than a salesperson,” says Lambert. “With our production experience, we’re well capable of helping a client go ten steps faster, but it requires taking the time to sit in a room to discuss rather than sell.”

Getting into the Agile Mindset

Many brands face an innovation imperative: the reality that they must continually improve their user experience by embracing new, often experimental technologies—and that they must do so quickly. But those who want to innovate must be prepared for a constant state of learning and experimentation. As MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar says, “Real innovation lies in learning how to start matching your products and services to evolve with user behavior.”

A flexible partner can help you grow into a more agile operational setup by helping you translate business outcomes into actionable goals. “You’re helping the internal organization to begin to think more agile,” says Lambert on the role that MediaMonks plays in its SCRUM processes. “We help them gather these challenges and bring these stakeholders together.”

Agile and planning go hand-in-hand.