Leading in a Time of Crisis

A distinct brand voice helps a company elevate its message and show the world who they are and what they stand for. As a historic moment unfolds around COVID-19, the way brands use their voices to communicate with us is more salient than ever. But it can be challenging to determine how much to flex your expression—to not be too optimistic, too despondent, or to stray too far from the authentic voice your customers know you for.

We’ve developed the tone of voice and messaging for many of our clients. For others, we know their expression style implicitly. Creating simple usage guidelines and do’s and don’ts during this pivotal time equips our clients with the tools they need to ensure success.

Have you mapped the different strategies and tactics you’ve developed and deployed during COVID-19? Chances are many of the rapid, agile strategies you’ve deployed are ones you’d need to replicate should another crisis occur that affects your brand. .

We are well positioned to help you quickly pivot and solve for how you live your purpose and ensure you’re prepared for what lies ahead. d economic aftermath. We can help you identify the most critical customer and stakeholder needs, prioritize concepts that deliver on your brand strategy and develop an internal and external communications plans and playbooks.

As your organization navigates changing market dynamics, your brand must transform as well. Your team and leadership are likely asking themselves: “What should we do and say differently?” and "How can we sell our products and services right now and ensure we’re being sensitive to the time?”

At Prophet-Springbox we use a modern approach that capitalizes on deep digital expertise. We work to understand changing customer behaviors across the entire omni-channel experience. We surface trends in your industry and isolate the moments that matter most to your audiences right now. We refine messaging, adjust voice, and design dynamic experiences that can efficiently pivot to your customers current needs.

Without a content strategy built to address issues relevant to the COVID-19 crisis, brands may struggle to continually build relationships with customers. Ensure your brand, marketing and servicing content across channels is proactively and reactively reassuring customers during this time of uncertainty.

We’ve designed an actionable content strategy development process to quickly diagnose and ideate content that solves customer problems, ensuring it connects to both customer and business needs.

Is your digital marketing delivering relevant messaging and impact to consumers amidst the COVID-19 crisis? Prophet can help stand up or enhance your digital marketing capabilities to continue to find growth opportunities and connect more deeply with customers in the face of adversity.

Our digital strategists can recommend digital marketing improvements to drive impact now.

Are the leaders of your company visible role models? Empower your leaders with the tools to support and guide their teams on how to best weather the storm and build confidence in the “new” future.

Prophet can design and run a virtual workshop to identify and activate the leadership behaviors needed to steer the business through the crisis and into the future. The top 3 behaviors are co-created (working with existing leadership frameworks if they exist or using our own research based key transformation behaviors). Using our proprietary trigger planning approach, leaders leave with a personalized action plan to activate the behaviors at key trigger moments for maximum impact.

This is a make or break moment for your business; you need to be there for your customers and show ongoing support. Prophet can help your frontline workforce meet the challenges that come with crisis via digital learning modules that boost their skills and allow them to be an ally to customers in unprecedented times.

As a digitally-powered, creatively-inspired consultancy, Prophet is uniquely able to help clients “be there” for their customers in their time of need. Our brand, CX, talent and digital experts can rapidly design and produce e-learning modules that are easily consumed by a client’s frontline when they need them most.

Though the realities of today’s environment preclude bringing together employees or customers for planned events, the necessity to reimagine them in a virtual world presents new opportunities and possibilities. With new tools and platforms – and a fresh perspective on what digital forums are uniquely and authentically capable of – the possibilities for community-building, interactive learning, real-time and on-demand content and heightened connection are as endless as your imagination.

With our extensive experience creating brand and employee events for companies from Chick-fil-A to United, we bring a multidisciplinary team of designers, strategists, digital experts, content creators and organization and culture experts to adapt and build world-class virtual event experiences.

How business leaders, managers and employees behave and “show up” has always been a critical input for how customers ultimately feel about a brand. The COVID-19 crisis presents brands with a greater opportunity to distinguish themselves in the marketplace through authentic and human interactions.

We help our clients develop specific behaviors - or “service styles” - that are aligned to, and further bring to life, their brand in the new world that is emerging. Our teams help answer the following: What new behaviors are brands required to exhibit because of the crisis? How can a business guide its employees to meet and exceed the evolving customer expectation?

Things are moving fast, and pressures to cut spend and shift priorities are increasing as well. We help CMOs rethink how to lead and deploy their teams, engage with customers, and manage their brand(s), marketing activities, spend, resources and reputation.

Prophet has deep experience in marketing planning along with the ability to pulse and apply new customer and market insights to marketing planning challenges. In this fast ‘sense, adapt and respond’ environment, we help partners power greater marketing agility by retooling teams with new, creative approaches to effectively redeploy marketing focus and investment.

For non-digital native brands - many have painfully experienced the crippling effects of not having a direct path to consumers. With longer term delays and challenges for traditional retailers and other CPG services, there is an opportunity to think differently about how you reach your customers.

Prophet can support by helping businesses assess and apply the DTC fundamentals of mobilizing the organization to position, engage, market and sell directly to consumers.

The abrupt shift to remote work has affected internal interactions between employees, as well as external interactions with customers, partners and vendors. This lack of in-person engagement can create points of operational friction and challenges in quality of employee experience. While remote tools provide some table-stakes continuity, companies need to have the appropriate models for using them effectively, as well as redesigned models for key business processes and workflows that need to be executed remotely.

We help clients quickly redesign high-impact processes and workflows for the remote environment, creating better user experiences in the near term, while also laying the foundation to create competitive advantage. The experience & innovation team brings a ‘maker mentality’ to the table and has extensive experience working with clients to help them learn by doing and collaborate as one cross-functional team.

What’s happening in the market now with my brands? What brand and consumer information does the management team need “right now” to close urgent information gaps? How might we use data to keep our brand(s) relevant today? With so much information available today, clients feel both anxious to do something, while also paralyzed to commit. It’s hard to efficiently and objectively cut through the clutter and figure out where to focus and invest.

Prophet get a quick, inside read of our clients’ organizations to identify the most pressing questions from top management. Pair this ‘inside view’ with an external market pulse, and specific information gaps can be filled. Our teams take this research and reporting, to inform and prepare brand and activation opportunities.

Have you thought about how you might use the current situation to test new ways of working? Strategic workforce planning must start with a good foundation.

Prophet helps design and rapidly test new ways of working to help our clients both navigate their businesses through the crisis, and to set the stage for the reality beyond. Through a series of rapid organizational design sprints, clients can simultaneously master the present and develop a more resilient, agile organization for the future.

Are you ready to make your next bold brand move? The reframed market potential is huge and there are wide gaps in the new brand territory. So, rewrite the rules of your industry, and move from optimizing the ‘push’ to creating a ‘pull’ business model.

With our proven approach, we integrate rigor, strategic thinking, experience design and engagement to redefine the role brands play in consumers‘ lives and to build relevance among various stakeholders. We support our clients by embracing by designing new purpose-led and winning brand experiences, while also reframing, re-charging and amplifying existing activations.