Abstract
PROBLEM AND DECISION
This case is situated in the early days of COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdown. The protagonist, Ashit, is the chief marketing officer (CMO) of a consumer durables company facing a considerable decline in sales. Ashit now needs to prepare and present a brand strategy to the CEO of the company. To this end, Ashit reviews the responses of companies across geographies and product categories to the emerging pandemic.
CONTEXT
The key contextual feature of the case situation is the COVID-19 pandemic. The government’s response of lockdown and the public’s sense of uncertainty and panic need to be considered while deciding Ashit’s next steps. Accordingly, this is not a situation of decline in sales of a particular company due to competition or new technology, but a problem that impacted most players in the industry.
This element of the context implies that the decision problem for Ashit is not just a question of customers but it also requires the firm to involve various other internal and external stakeholders in responding to a crisis. Overall, the context is that of a crisis that has negatively impacted business performance, requiring stakeholder management to maintain and build a brand.
ANALYSIS APPROACHES
Given the general applicability of the case situation across companies and brands during the emerging pandemic, the case can be analysed in multiple ways, of which a few are discussed here.
Crisis Management
The first approach to analysing this case is through the lens of an organization attempting to manage its path through an unexpected crisis. Ashit needs to decide how the consumer durables brand will face the challenges brought about by the pandemic. For instance, there has been a strong decline in sales. Other companies have faced issues such as panic buying by customers, lay-offs of employees, financial difficulties and uncertainty related to future demand. How the brand responds to the challenges will determine its trajectory in this crisis. For this purpose, understanding a taxonomy of crisis and its causes could help analyse the situation and brand responses.
Societal Marketing
The second lens that can be applied in analysing this case is that of societal marketing, arising from the diversity of stakeholders that the brand is responsible to. The nature of stakeholders for the consumer durables brand will determine the impact of the crisis and the potential brand response. Customers are a major stakeholder, but because the crisis is multidimensional, several other stakeholders such as employees, logistics providers, government and others have to be considered. To do this, it is useful to consider a broad classification of stakeholders from a societal perspective such as internal, external and other relevant stakeholders. This classification could guide the analysis by helping understand the impact of the crisis (on each stakeholder) and the corresponding brand response.
Competitive Strategy
The third approach to analysing this case involves focusing on competitors. The case provides detailed information on how various brands, not restricted to competitors of the brand in the case, have responded to the pandemic as it evolved. Analysing these brand responses and evaluating them along a set of criteria could provide a clearer idea of the options available for Ashit as next steps. Studying the actions undertaken by various brands and customer reactions to these brands could mitigate some of the uncertainty faced by the consumer durables brand in determining its response to the crisis.
IMPLICATIONS FOR CRISIS MANAGEMENT
This case provides scope for analysing the organizational response to crises. In particular, the case is set at a period when the COVID-19 pandemic was still nascent so that the nature and scale of the pandemic was not fathomable. There are few such high-uncertainty and high-impact crises in recent history. The time at which the case is set is also at the emergent stage of the pandemic. As a result, businesses faced tremendous unpredictability in terms of the magnitude, nature and duration of the impact of the crisis.
While the immediate experience included widespread lockdowns and decline in sales of consumer durables, very soon supply chain disruptions and production backlogs meant that organizations were hampered in their day-to-day business. In addition to business breakdown, organizations also faced issues related to employees in terms of health and morale. All of this created a situation where organizations had to respond immediately to multiple stakeholder concerns. This case provides a detailed picture of the crisis as it developed and the initial responses of a wide range of brands as they tried to make collective sense of the pandemic.
The case, thus, allows for analysing and drawing lessons from the emerging crisis brought about by the pandemic, its impact on multiple stakeholders and the response of the organization (and the brand).
IMPLICATIONS FOR BRAND STRATEGY
The case provides opportunities to analyse and learn from the responses of several brands to the COVID-19 crisis. A detailed look at the crisis clearly shows the importance of managing multiple stakeholders of the brand. Taking a societal marketing perspective helps identify these stakeholders and determine the impact of the crisis on each stakeholder. Based on this analysis, it is possible to test the use and applicability of various principles of brand strategy in the context of the crisis.
The case provides examples of a set of brands that undertook marketing communication and brand actions in the light of the pandemic. These examples highlight some of the plausible measures that could be adopted as part of the brand response to the crisis. Further ideas on the next steps for the consumer durables brand of interest in the case could be developed based on the two perspectives: stakeholder impact and brand strategy.