In times of trouble and public trauma it is quite common for company marketing channels to masquerade as public information broadcasters, but in this current climate of fake news and armchair punditry, this kind of activity could be doing a lot more harm than good.

Ok, I’m just going to come right out and say it… Coronavirus!! Now before everyone stops reading this to head out and panic buy toilet roll, I invite you to join me as I explore the rights and wrongs of disaster marketing in the context of a global pandemic (or something similar). I’m not going to lie, as a digital marketer who likes to consider himself ethical, disaster marketing does tend to leave a sour taste in my mouth. One of my previous employers (mentioning no names) was obsessed with this type of activity, to the point where we used to trawl the international press looking for an earthquake or a mudslide to leverage. I used to get emails which just had the subject line ‘opportunity?’ and in the body a single hyperlink to a story in the Kashmir Gazette about 25,000 people losing their homes in an unseasonal flood. Personally my mind doesn’t work like that, and I can’t say I’m disappointed.

But not all disaster marketing is so opportunistically brutal. It seems like every corporate website I visit at the moment has a brand new page/blog/news story about Covid-19, and who can blame them? You don’t need to interrogate your ‘trends’ account to know that CV is the hottest subject on the block right now, and like day always following night, marketers HAVE to follow trends, it’s the law. For the most part, instead of offering any real insight these pages exist to promote their companies social responsibility credentials. These businesses want you the consumer or client to think of them as caring and compassionate, that beyond offering their goods or services they actually like you, and want you to be ok. I hate to burst anyone’s bubble here, but business is business, capitalism is capitalism, and all they really want is you well enough to keep giving them money.

“Business is business, capitalism is capitalism, and all they really want is you well enough to keep giving them money.”

If these businesses really gave a monkey’s then they might want to consider NOT having a Corona Virus page, or if they really have to, then a single hyperlink to the current official government advice would be fine. Creating a public health information page is not something to be taken lightly. Do you really want to take responsibility for keeping this 100% up to date at all times? What if the advice changes at 2am on a Sunday morning, are you going to have a content manager on hand to react 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Because if you can’t keep the advice bang up to date then it’s going to do a lot more harm than good, only succeeding in at best destroying your socially responsible reputation, and at worst actually killing your customers… that ‘dead’ segment doesn’t tend to show a lot of ROI.

So please, before you jump on the viral band-wagon it might be worth stopping to consider whether you really should go ahead with it… keep that message internal, stick it up on the SharePoint, and keep the client blood off your hands.