Page 22 - Demo

The era of impact branding Lis here
A third, Moody’s,
joined them a month
into the country’s Level
5 lockdown when it too downgraded South Africa’s sovereign credit rating to junk status. This followed almost three years of warnings to the country’s leaders to get their act together by implementing economic reforms and presenting clear economic policies – buttressed by
a stabler political outlook
– in order to generate
In a rather sinister way, Covid-19 lockdowns turned out to be corporate levellers – or, perhaps, corporate wrecking balls
20 | ISSUE 1 2021
BRANDS ARE USED TO COMPETING WITH OTHER
IKE EVERYONE
ELSE, most
corporate
brands were MESSAGES BECAME IRRELEVANT AND PRODUCT
BRANDS. THEN CAME COVID-19 AND ADVERTISING PUSHES SOUNDED TONE DEAF. FOR SAVVY
unprepared for the ravages
wrought by Covid-19-
related lockdowns on MARKETERS, THIS WAS AN OPPORTUNITY TO economies around the
world. South Africa was in
no better space than others
when it all began to unravel.
Our economy was already
on its knees, downgraded
to junk status by two of
the big three global ratings
agencies, S&P Global
Ratings and Fitch Group,
some three years before the
advent of the pandemic.
SHOW THAT THEY REALLY HAVE THEIR CLIENTS’ AND CUSTOMERS’ INTERESTS AT HEART.
By Solly Moeng
market confidence and attract investors.
away from traditional office set-ups managed to adapt quickly and remain liquid. Countless others failed, bringing with them widespread losses of income and jobs in the formal sector.
consumer tastes, sentiments and brand- engagement preferences. The truth is that the era
of ‘shareholder-focused’ brand management is fast receding and being replaced by an era of ‘broader stakeholder- focused’ brand engagement that must also take into account the realisation of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The focus of these goals is necessarily a lot more complete,
as they include issues such as social justice
and environmental sustainability.
– at a time when many small to medium brands did not have the kind of financial reserves needed to see them through
an unknown number of months during which they would not be allowed
to operate normally and generate adequate revenue to finance their overheads. Only those that were already set up to operate digitally and had the means to do so
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING OF THE
NEW BEGINNING
Much of what many
brands were doing in the relatively early days, as they tried to emerge from the effects of hard Covid-19 lockdown, was driven more by desperation to survive than by the need to fully understand, embrace and integrate fast-changing