What marketers can learn from viruses

Distribute contagious content and mutate existing content to survive as a brand.

At the start of 2020, I was reading the book, Narrative Economics, by top economist and Nobel prize winner Robert Shiller. Not knowing how relevant what he wrote would be only a couple of months later. Shiller explains in his book how our economy is not just based on numbers, but to a very large extent on stories. To illustrate this, he uses the metaphor of an epidemic. And let that epidemic, or rather its nastier relative, the pandemic, be our current narrative since COVID-19 invaded our world.
“Economic narratives follow the same pattern as the spread of disease: a rising number of infected people who spread the narrative for a while, followed by a period of forgetting and falling interest in talking about the narrative.” ~ Robert J. Schiller

About the curve

As we all know by now, the curve increases when the number of infections exceeds the number of recoveries + deaths. And the curve decreases when the number of infections is smaller than the number of recoveries + deaths.
Shiller compares the epidemic curve to stories that influence our economy. Like the stories about bitcoin or trust in the stock market. He says that if the number of distributions of a narrative exceeds the number of people who lose interest + the number of people who forget it, the narrative goes viral. Word spreads. That means that the audience curve will increase. The audience will grow. But if the number of distributions of the narrative is smaller than the number of people who lose interest + the number of people who forget about it, the audience curve will decrease. The audience declines.

R0 (R nought), or the reproduction rate

This can also be explained by R0, or the reproduction rate. If the number of people getting infected by a virus is lower than 1, the virus curve flattens. Fewer people become infected and more people have recovered (or died and, therefore, stopped spreading the virus). In marketing we need to have a look at this reproduction factor from another angle and our efforts should be the opposite: we have to avoid that our audience curve flattens out or, even worse, decreases.

Now what can we learn from Shiller and the pandemic?

What do you think will happen to brands and organizations that freeze their marketing budgets? When they stop talking to and with their audiences? When they stop spreading their narratives? Of course, it depends on how strong a brand’s narrative is, but is it possible that in the long run, when a brand stops spreading and renewing the narrative, people will lose interest and forget about that brand? I think every marketer knows the answer to this. I’m also very well aware that budgets are given and cut in the boardroom and they could be panicking in there because less money is coming in due to global lockdowns, which will in all likelihood be followed by a recession. But doing nothing will cause a decline in your audience. In the long run, your brand could even disappear permanently from your audience’s minds, and it’ll cost even more to reinstall your brand again. So what can we do?

Treatment of your content marketing program

There are three things we can learn from Shiller and his comparison of marketing to viruses.

1. Mutate your content

First of all, viruses spread. If you want to retain the audience you’ve already gained, you have to aim for a narrative reproduction ratio of 1. That doesn’t mean you can sit down and do nothing, because R1 also includes the people who ‘forget about your narrative’. So, you need to keep up spreading or distributing the narrative amongst your audience. If there is no budget to create new content, then be creative and mutate your content. In other words: adapt and reuse, recycle or repurpose the content you already have. For example: look at the content you have created in the last year. Can you repost it with a different angle? For example: Can you use the video that you’ve created for a job opening again to explain how your customer service works?

2. Create unique quality content people won’t become immune to

If you want to grow your audience in these times when everyone is online, the reproduction ratio should be above 1. Multiple KPIs need to be considered to exceed a reproduction rate of 1 in order to grow your audience’. Like a virus, your narrative has to be unique; otherwise, people will become immune to it. This video that Jon Mowat, Managing Director of Hurricane Media, showed at the online conference Content Days, shows perfectly how quickly ’people become immune to messages.

Another thing: the narrative also has to be targeted to a ‘susceptible’ group of people. This is all a matter of quality and relevance. What story is relevant to whom and at what moment? Quality of content is one of the main ingredients to the post-COVID survival of your brand.

3. Distribute contagious content

The third things we can learn concerns the distribution of the narrative. Without a distribution strategy, the reproduction rate depends entirely on the quality of the narrative and its receivers. Is the narrative worth talking about to others? Is it contagious enough? It might be, but that’s almost never the result of strategy, but of luck. So rethink your distribution strategy. Where should you spread your (contagious) narrative? There are very few live superspread events due to lockdowns, but the whole world is online. And as Sabine Schmidt from Hubspot explained in her online session at Content Days, CPM costs are low as demand has decreased. So invest in a distribution strategy if you want your brand to survive and thrive or to retain your audience.

Recap

If you want your brand to survive post-COVID, rethink your content marketing strategy. Mutate your content and repurpose it. Be unique and create quality content that is resistant to all other narratives your audience is confronted with. And last but not least, distribute contagious content to a ‘susceptible’ audience. That way your brand will survive.

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