Avoiding the Digital Jitters
As the food industry works to adapt to the ever-evolving “new normal” brought on by this global pandemic, we continue to talk regularly with food companies and healthcare professionals to better understand how we can help both of these constituencies navigate difficult waters.
Talking with food brand marketers, nutrition team members, and executives, we are mostly hearing calm, measured approaches that prioritize the health and safety of their employees and of consumers over drastic changes to their marketing plans or approaches. After all, grocery stores remain open, although shopping is quite a different experience, and what the next few months will bring is not yet known.
We are, however, hearing about some food companies and brands who are getting, what we call, the digital jitters. These companies and brands are talking about dramatic shifts toward digital communication and advertising because, well, everyone is at home. That’s a reasonable conclusion to draw—a shift toward digital communication makes sense in the current environment.
That’s the digital part of the story, but here is where the jitters come in. These companies and brands are apparently planning to abandon well-constructed, efficient, and effective health professional marketing plans and flocking to high reach, low impact digital advertising tactics simply because they are digital. They are mistaking the road for the destination.
During these unprecedented times, our clients are taking a step back and basing their short-term decision making on facts, strategy and flexibility:
Facts: Health professionals are at work. While the number of in-office visits are down significantly and telemedicine/email counseling is up, platforms that engage health & wellness professionals through their preferred physical materials and resources should not be wholly abandoned. Continuing to meet health professionals needs and preferences while supplementing with digital outreach is an effective response to the changes to the landscape forged by the pandemic.
Strategy: Nothing should change on this front. Your health professional outreach strategy is the same: build relationships of trust and credibility with targeted health & wellness professionals to build their product knowledge and earn branded recommendations of your product. How you execute against this strategy may require tweaking in the current moment, but don’t simply abandon the strategy to pour money into digital advertising and wellness social media influencers—channels that are not only less effective, but often completely counter to your existing strategy.
Flexibility: If there’s one thing we know about the impact of COVID-19 is that we don’t know what the next several months will look like. Keeping your tactical mix and approach flexible means that you will be best positioned to adapt with the changing times. Adding digital engagement with health professionals to your current programs and platforms, including the distribution of digital versions of materials, allows you to leverage the strengths of your current approach while addressing the unique needs of health professionals at the moment. It also ensures that you can pivot back more easily and effectively as our new normal begins to look more like our old normal.
We are not arguing against incorporating more digital activation into your health professional marketing mix. We are simply warning against the digital jitters—the knee-jerk reaction to throw digital spaghetti at the wall simply because it’s digital. It has been a difficult time and there are certainly more difficult days ahead. Keeping faith with your health professional strategy and approach, while incorporating a sensible mix of digital tactics will not only best position you moving forward, but will allow your healthy food brands to remain true to the values that are important to your organization and your consumers.