Executive Summary

• During economic uncertainty, consumer priorities are likely to shift, and it’s up to brands to determine how to address them properly. 
• Some ways brands can stay essential in the eyes of consumers include strengthening customer relationships, emphasizing core values, and adapting offerings to ensure the most value. 
• As customer priorities shift for financial purposes, it’s important for brands to speak to their target audience’s values and maintain transparency in their operating practices. 
• Worthwhile investments during economic downturn include emotional marketing efforts, influencer and brand partnerships, and digital marketing, among other initiatives. 

Brand Relevance and Economic Uncertainty 

Economic uncertainty can bring challenging waters for brands to navigate. But the need for products and services hardly disappears. Brands can still bring joy and relief to consumers in times of economic stress, and if they do it right, the positive effects could be felt for years to come. 

Brands that recognize this and find ways to deliver joy can maintain relevance through hard times—the key often lies in building strong relationships, sustaining consumer loyalty by offering undeniable value, and tapping into crucial emotional bonds.

Understanding how to meet consumers where they’re at will allow brands to continue in their success, even when the economy is facing a potential downturn. This process involves positioning your brand as committed to your audience, meeting your consumers’ needs and interests, and investing in thoughtful emotional marketing efforts to communicate your commitments.

Understanding Shifts in Consumer Behavior During Economic Downturns

During tough economic times, people cut back, but the desire for the joy and comfort that brands can provide doesn’t fade. Our Brand Joy Lab at PETERMAYER has found that 74% of Americans rely on moments of joy to get them through tough times. Still, consumers are more likely to gravitate to brands that align with their values, offer a sense of trustworthiness, and provide indisputable value. 

Some of the factors to consider include: 

• Customer prioritization of needs over wants 
• Increased desire for value and quality at lower prices
• Higher demand for transparency 
• Interest in brands that engage in social responsibility
• The value of brand trust

It’s important that brands know how to adapt their messaging, marketing, and even production strategies in order to provide the most value to consumers. Listening to consumers, understanding their needs, and building data-driven initiatives to match will be key to adapting to behavioral and sustaining brand loyalty. 

Steps To Stay Essential During Economic Uncertainty

During periods of economic uncertainty, brands can take some of the following steps to reinforce their position in the marketplace and continue to resonate with their consumers. 

Strengthening Customer Relationships and Loyalty

In times when the economy is up in the air, relationships mean everything. Eighty percent of consumers say that trust is a deciding factor in their purchasing decisions. When consumers become even more selective of their purchases, it’s important that brands create relationships centered around trust to maintain loyalty among their customers.

Some strategies for strengthening your customer relationships include:

• Stay consistent – Customers turn away from brands that use tactics like shrinkflation, skimpflation, or hidden fees during economic downturn, so continuing to offer a quality product with transparency will help you maintain trust and strong relationships with customers.
• Personalized customer engagement – Using strategic data to personalize interactions makes customers feel valued and increases their likelihood of seeking your brand in moments of need. 
• Offering loyalty programs – Loyalty programs provide consumers with tangible incentives, like discounts or value adds, to continue purchasing from your brand, which is often appreciated in times of tighter budgeting.
• Open communication and empathy – An empathetic approach can help deepen customer relationships in hard times and position your brand as a source of joy and support that consumers can turn to for relief and comfort. Social media channels offer a clear line of communication between brands and customers. Don’t look at these platforms as mere marketing channels; use them to connect with your audience.

By using these tools to strengthen your relationships with consumers, you can continue to stand out amongst competitors in your market. Customer retention will be vital to riding the waves of economic fluctuation, so it’s essential to invest in sustaining consumer confidence and loyalty.

Emphasizing Core Values and Brand Mission

Brands can stay at the forefront of customers' minds by remaining committed to their audiences’ needs and highlighting their value and overall mission. When consumers have to prioritize their purchases, they are more likely to gravitate toward brands that align with their own core values. Brands should tell their stories through emotional marketing strategies to strengthen bonds with consumers that relate to them.

Brands can take these key steps:

• Reinforce brand purpose – Brands should consider crafting a brand story to reinforce their purpose and highlight their mission to serve consumers and provide for their needs, even in times of uncertainty. 
• Showcase social responsibility efforts – Engaging in and highlighting social responsibility efforts like community service or donations demonstrates a commitment to customers and their communities, improving credibility in the eyes of consumers. 
• Maintain transparent business practices – Transparency is key to consumer trust, so communicate your business practices and prices to keep the consumer relationship strong. 

Emphasizing your core values should remain a priority throughout all your brand messaging. Still, it’s crucial that you act out these values and your brand mission in every step of your processes, not just your messaging. Staying transparent about your values and practices, offering friendly customer service, and responding to customer concerns will all help your brand stand out, regardless of the economy.

Adapting Offerings to Meet Changing Consumer Needs

Although economic questions can make it difficult to reach a sense of urgency within consumers, brands can find ways to compromise with their consumers by offering quality yet affordable products. Most notably, brands can adapt their products and services to provide consumers with greater value, creating a space for them even when budgets are tight.
Some options include:

• Evaluating your own product lines – Brands should understand which products offer the most value to consumers and how to prioritize product lines in order to produce those that will best speak to consumer needs and interests.
• Developing affordable alternatives – Consider creating a smaller form of your products or services that come at a lower price to make your offerings more accessible to consumers and their budgets. 
• Prioritizing convenience and accessibility – Convenience makes your consumers more likely to turn to you in times of need, so offer benefits like enhanced delivery options, payment flexibility, and cross-channel digital accessibility. 

Any adaptations should be informed by your audience so that your message will resonate with maximum impact. Strategies like social media listening, consumer surveys, and market research can help your brand understand what your consumers’ needs really are and how to address them.

Communicating Value and Benefits Effectively

A significant 72% of consumers say that value of money is an important element of building brand trust. During times of economic uncertainty, value is at the forefront of many consumers’ minds. With this desire, it’s crucial that brands can establish and communicate the value behind their products and ensure this message resonates first and foremost among consumers. 

• Communicating the value propositions that you offer consumers, like quality, durability, and long-term benefits, on top of a reasonable price. 
• Highlighting testimonials and case studies of consumer success can be a great way to showcase your success and value offerings.
• Create educational content like video tutorials and how-to guides to help consumers make informed decisions.

Our research shows that 63% of consumer purchase intent is tied to the joy consumers experience via a brand’s marketing communications. It will be essential that you create campaigns that effectively communicate the value and benefits of your product or services through mindful brand messaging. 

Focusing on Thoughtful Marketing Strategies

With a potentially thinner budget and the need to make the most of your marketing efforts, it’s important to be thoughtful about which strategies you invest in. You can focus on balancing short and long-term marketing efforts in order to fortify your relationships with consumers. 

Digital marketing is one way to maintain cost-effective marketing and still reach your audiences. You can elevate these efforts by creating high-impact content that resonates with consumers, prioritizing cost-effective channels like social media, email marketing, and SEO and leveraging customer data in the process. However, that doesn’t mean you should go all-in on these strategies and invest solely in digital marketing. 

Emotionally driven brand building and emotional marketing is likely the most impactful strategy. This form of brand building is likely to form a deeper bond with the consumer and boost loyalty, even during tough economic times. Building campaigns centered around emotion, using joy in advertising, and brand storytelling will all serve you better in the long term by resonating with consumers and creating lasting relationships.

Each of the above approaches is beneficial in its own way, so it’s crucial to have a balance between the short-term potential of performance marketing and the long-term potential of building meaningful consumer bonds. If you need help in determining where to concentrate your efforts, consider consulting a brand-building agency that can assist you in understanding your target audience and how to best engage them. 

Exploring Partnerships and Collaborations

Whether it’s a collaboration with another brand or an influencer with a large audience, partnerships can help you maximize your outreach efforts at a greater value. Brand partnerships and collaborations provide an opportunity to increase the reach of your audience and obtain a higher return on investment from your spending.

Meanwhile, collaborating with influencers can allow you to reach a wider audience with lower marketing spend. Engaging in influencer marketing with trusted, reputable influencers can enhance your credibility and tap into existing audiences without having to organize specific campaigns or produce your own creatives. 

Investing in Innovation

Even during uncertainty, it’s worthwhile to invest in new ideas and innovation in order to captivate consumers and build new relationships. Innovating during these times can demonstrate your value and keep consumers interested in your brand. 

You may also consider experimenting with new business models to appeal to a broader audience. Some common examples include subscription models requiring a small fee to access a platform with significant features, a bundling model that offers more products at a more valuable price than selling them all separately, and a freemium model of offering some features for free with a subscription for more advanced features.

As you think about making this switch, consider your target audience and what is most likely to resonate with them. The support of a branding agency can help you determine what strategy is best for you and your audience. 

Maintain Brand Relevance During Challenging Times

During uncertain economic times, consumer behavior changes, so it is up to brands to adapt their strategy to meet their needs and interests. Brands must stay essential and relevant by continuing to serve consumers with quality products, maintaining transparency in values, and emphasizing their offerings. A branding agency can help you meet your target audience where they are.

At PETERMAYER, we can help you build strategic campaigns that will speak to your target audience regardless of the status of the economy. Our team uses data-driven insights to understand your unique audience and what steps you can take to best resonate with them. Most of all, we’ll help you unlock the joy that exists within your brand and communicate it to your consumers through our Brand Joy Lab, our always-on insights engine that uncovers how brands can deliver joy to their customers.

‍Schedule a call with our team at PETERMAYER to learn more about how we can help you adapt to economic and social trends and still find ways to reach your consumers.