Editor’s note: Megan Routh is a consulting strategist with research firm Open Mind Strategy, New York.
Talk to any Millennial a few months ago and they would tell you there is nothing more anxiety provoking than an actual, real-time phone call. But that was in the old world.
In the solitude of quarantine, a craving for intimacy and stronger personal connections means consumers once notoriously adverse to spontaneous, face-to-face communications, now want to hear each other's voices and see each other's faces more than ever.
Social isolation and the COVID-19 crisis have totally rewritten our cultural rules of communication. But the frantic ways we’re corresponding now will shift how we connect beyond lockdown.
1. Democratization of digital communities
Celebrities are live-streaming with anyone who asks to join; anonymous Zoom dance parties take place every night. When ordered to stay home, it only took a matter of days for everyone to start broadcasting themselves, mostly to seemingly chaotic and confusing ends.
While it seems haphazard, each interaction is an expansion of community that chips away at our cultural fear of IRL intimacy and democratizes digital communities.
As more white-collar workers are beginning to wonder not when they’re going to return to the office this year, but why they would ever return to an office at all, big cities are looking at an exodus of knowledge workers, and thus, their cultural capital.
This migration gives brands a mandate to expand their offerings to larger, more diverse groups of consumers as they use digital tools to build new communities across the country.
Take The Wing, a women’s coworking space based in urban hubs. When forced to close, they quickly pivoted from meeting rooms to Zoom, making the interconnectedness of their community accessible online.
2. An exasperation with aspiration
The filtered, everything-is-perfect image that is the hallmark of influencer and celebrity marketing has never been less appropriate than it is now. In a global crisis, consumers are rejecting content that screams aspiration, and are instead looking for ways to share in and mitigate our collective exasperation.
From live baking tutorials and yoga flow in cluttered bedrooms to organized Zoom support sessions, we're all content creators and each other's influencers. "Coming to you live" from the physical and emotional messiness of quarantine is recalibrating our relationship with reality, causing us to eschew unreasonable expectations and embrace “doing the best we can do” as the new form of “living our best life.”
Heineken’s recent spot montages the relatable pain points of our endless digital gatherings and nods to the fact that quarantine life isn’t great, but we’re all just trying to make it through.
3. Optimism as self-care
During the pandemic, against a backdrop of endless doomsday news, we’re clamoring for more optimism. The snark, sarcasm and troll-like tone that was once a hallmark of the internet is being replaced by uplifting content. For a moment this week, “Duck Pool Party,” a stream of ducks playing in a pool, was the most viewed Reddit livestream. Even notoriously snarky brands like Wendy’s are shifting their Twitter strategy, at least temporarily, to encourage camaraderie through games, activities and shared stories.
Wholesome, positive content has become a balm to cure our anxiety, a form of self-care that fills a void and provides a sense of calm that face masks and baking cannot.
4. A fascination with the facts
Life in the time of the coronavirus is marked by an insatiable consumption of facts. In a short period of time, consumers, especially younger ones who have been criticized for being coddled their whole lives, have become amazingly good at distilling information from the inane.
Unlikely figures of cultural affection like Anthony Fauci and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (and his curt PowerPoint slides) have emerged as leading men of the Pandemic thanks to their straightforward delivery of facts. Now, to be worthy of consumers’ time, you need to be giving it to them straight. Frito Lay’s COVID-spot, “It’s About People,” won praise for saying what they were doing to help employees, not sell chips.
But the most trustworthy brand voice comes from perhaps the most unlikely player: Steak Umms, who has emerged as a “voice of truth” thanks to their straight-forward, no-nonsense tweets that are, at times, radical. The brand’s willingness to tweet bold opinions, not mild platitudes, has earned them double their pre-COVID-19 audience and the admiration of the internet.
Post-crisis, when we all emerge shell-shocked, knowing that catastrophe can hit again at any moment, people will still want this kind of straightforward talk from brands with big platforms.