How to communicate with customers both during and after COVID-19

17 June 2020

At this point, we are all experts in how the COVID-19 pandemic has turned our world upside down, leaving us feeling stressed, anxious, afraid and uncertain. Life has changed for all of us and so has the way we communicate with customers.

Founder, Crawford Hollingworth hosted a webinar on April 28th, exclusive to TBA clients, to share TBA’s new behavioural science-inspired model and toolkit for creating communication that is effective in this current environment.

Not only that, but we’ve also been busy publishing our book on this topic: “How to connect and communicate in these challenging times”. This book is designed to guide you through our model on how to diagnose and understand the behaviours we are witnessing and, most importantly, how to apply our 3-step behavioural science communications toolkit for the COVID-19 context. Ultimately, it provides a robust and contextually sensitive approach to effective communication.

Here’s a glimpse of what our book will take you through.

We outline three steps in the process:

Step 1: Define your audience and communication objectives

Think about where your customers are now and your communication objectives.

Step 2: Define the behavioural outcomes

Define the exact behavioural and emotional outcomes of your communication. What exactly is it you want your audience to feel, or to think, do or not do?

Step 3: Behavioural Science concepts for developing communication structure and content

For each behavioural science concept in our model, we first define it, then show why leveraging this concept will enhance communications in today’s challenging times, as well as bringing the model to life with some examples.

Here is a sneak peek of our simple, three-part model and the concepts that our book illustrates.

1. For Developing All Communication: System 1 and Cognitive Ease, Chunking, Default, Anchoring, Framing

2. To Aid Behavioural Change and Action: Authority, Social norms, Social Identity, Feedback

3. To Drive an Emotional Connection: Availability, Affect, Reciprocity

We will not be in this situation forever, and when we emerge on the other side, we will remember the brands that made our lives easier and who were kind to us.

You can access full details of our model and toolkit by clicking here to download our ebook: “How to connect and communicate in these challenging times.”

We hope you enjoy it, and please let us know your thoughts!

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