As part of our new series, ‘Marketers Playbook for 2020 Post Covid-19?, Gaurav Mehta, CMO, CarDekho believes that the current period seems to be the most crucial time to either develop or maintain the media presence. The global pandemic has had an alarming impact on businesses worldwide, resulting in many companies either closing operations or remotely operating through the work-from-home module. All this disruption has made us rethink how to ensure business continuity and manage sales, marketing, customer support and compliance. This unprecedented situation has provided corporates ample opportunities to think out of the box and beyond their research and playbooks to ensure business continuity. It is of utmost importance for marketers to learn from each other’s initiatives when it comes to marketing their product. Post the crisis, brands will change and adapt to new communication strategies. These circumstances have taught us to prioritize, ration and collaborate. Consumers have changed their daily routine and formed a new and synchronized transition to digital mediums. Thus, making a new approach of connecting to the consumers, while brands invest in the right places will ensure the mediums are more effective and collaborative. As a marketer, some of my perspectives are from the consumer side while some are from the business side. As a company, we must be acutely aware of our stand in the crowd. Loss aversion theory of Behavioural Economics tells us that human beings are more concerned about securing their losses rather than looking for gains. The same consumer behaviour and surrounding negativity, people find themselves surrounded with, compel us as a socially conscious brand to understand our role in it. When things get back to normal, consumers would like to see a brand being more considerate with purpose-driven actions and messages. During this tough time, empathy is the way to go. Every message said by a brand must include empathy, courage and humility and avoid the urgency of the call to action. In other words, let us not focus on transactional success. Over a longer time, this will help brands strike the right chords with people and create the right resonance. Overall, marketing communication will have to be reassuring, relevant and more purposeful than before. As content consumption is at an all-time high, producing content that the consumers will view on their own accord can be a good alternative to the native advertising six-second videos. Content that brings a ray of hope to the consumers or ways to navigate through these unprecedented times will have a far better impact for the brand. Digital adoption is rising day by day during this lockdown. Therefore, it becomes imperative for brands to invest their time into to reap longer success is Search Engine Optimization. Under normal circumstances, SEO might take an extended time to optimize for the brand. However, brands can devote longer duration in developing the SEOs during the lockdown and when things go back to normal post lockdown, SEOs will further enable the businesses into smooth transitioning back to profitability. Lastly, this seems to be the most crucial time to either develop or maintain the media presence. With the steady increase in extremist content, brand advertising appearing next to unsavoury content, a brand’s image is at a very delicate state. With evolving government policies each day and new business consumer segments, brands need to be more self-aware of how and what they say. Marketers must remain vigilant, especially with the proliferation of user-generated content. Brands need a more robust approach to identify content devoid of any risk to brand safety and adopt tailored approaches relying on data analytics and machine learning to assess the context and what we deliver to our audience. One thing is clear: marketers in the post-COVID-19 era will have to rethink what technologies they need, which ones can help them save money, and which ones can help them transform their businesses that have been altered by this crisis.