Brand names risk irking their customers by promoting vaccination

Whether to promote Covid-19 vaccination is a tough choice for the marketers who steer America’s biggest brand names. Going big on getting shots will please some customers but annoy others. “The country is in its adolescent years when it comes to how companies and brands are expected to act or publicly address social issues,” marketing expert Sheri Roder writes in an email. “Given the many changes we have all experienced over the past 12-18 months, the path is not at all straightforward. It’s as if business and their brands are having to figure out what they want to be when they grow up.”Roder is an executive vice president of Horizon Media Inc., the nation’s biggest independent agency that decides where advertising will appear, a service called media planning. She’s also chief of Horizon’s WHY unit, which attempts to understand customers’ mindsets and motivations. She gave me an early look at a WHY study of 850 U.S. adults in April that found that 54% said they trusted brands as information sources. The share who said vaccine promotion would improve their perception of a brand was 23 percentage points higher than the share who said it would worsen their perception. On the other hand, brand managers are loath to irk anti-vaxxers. “There’s a group of people saying, ‘Stay out of my life. I don’t need you intruding on something that’s a personal decision,’” says Roder.The risk is that companies could end up preaching only to the converted—promoting vaccines to people who are already receptive to the message while being quiet around those who aren’t. Roder admits that’s a concern but says there are ways companies can promote vaccination without putting their brands in jeopardy, such as by donating to vaccination campaigns.Here’s what a few companies are doing: In April, Ford Motor Co.’s company fund launched a vaccination-promotion public service announcement with leaders of 11 multicultural organizations, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson of Rainbow/Push, and it marked the distribution of 120 million face masks. Anheuser-Busch InBev NV in February skipped advertising its Budweiser beer brand at the Super Bowl for the first time in 37 years and said it would donate instead to a vaccine awareness campaign. (It did advertise other beer brands, including Bud Light.)Capital One Financial Corp. is working with church groups, DJs, and others in metro Washington to promote vaccination in marginalized and underrepresented communities.Black Entertainment Television LLC partnered with Tyler Perry on Covid-19 Vaccine and the Black Community: A Tyler Perry Special.Krispy Kreme Doughnut Corp. offered a free doughnut to anyone who showed up with a vaccination card. But to avoid alienating customers who made the “highly personal decision” not to get vaccinated, it said they could get a free doughnut and a coffee on Mondays through May 24. Not easy. Says Roder in an interview: “Brands at the end of the day have to represent themselves. Maybe they don’t have to take a stand. Do they have to? I think that’s the question of the day.”Source: bloomberg