What you’ll read: From gum companies to dating apps, these brands focused on sending messages about reconnecting in a post Covid-19 world.
As lockdowns began to lift earlier this year and vaccination programs succeeded, people around the world allowed themselves to hope for the arrival of the new normal. Brands picked up on consumers’ desire to reconnect with other humans — to break bread with family, raise a glass with friends, and mingle with the masses. Savvy marketers recognized the likelihood that after more than a year isolated at home, people would sprint into each other’s arms as soon as it was safe. As a result, 2021 ushered in a whole new style of post-COVID ad campaign.
Become the best CRMer you can:
CRM Hack: Monitoring the User’s Heartbeat
What Does It Mean to Treat a Customer’s Email With Respect?
To Lock or Not to Lock Customers (into CRM Journeys)
What the Efforts to Promote Responsible Gaming Look Like Form the Inside
In this article we’ll investigate three brand campaigns that expertly embraced the public’s desire to reconnect.
EXTRA Gum: For When It’s Time
EXTRA Gum took the aesthetics of isolation to the extreme in this film-style ad spot — a woman exhumes herself from a mountain of dusty pizza boxes, a very bearded man feels the sun on his skin, neighbors lay eyes on each other for the first time. As masses of people run into the streets in various states of undress, Celine Dion’s classic “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now” reaches a crescendo. And before hugging, kissing, canoodling, and cavorting out in the world, these liberated souls pause to slip sticks of EXTRA in their mouths.
While toilet paper and hand sanitizer were in scarce supply during the pandemic, chewing gum was considerably easier to find. For the most part, consumers weren’t meeting anyone that they didn’t already live with. In “For When It’s Time,” EXTRA perfectly captures the animal urge to be together again. In addition to creating a hopeful, inspirational ad that reflected the times, EXTRA encouraged consumers to reach for their brand’s breath freshener next time they head out into society.
SuitSupply: The New Normal is Coming
SuitSupply has a reputation for controversial advertising, but the Holland-based menswear company’s “The New Normal is Coming” campaign swings about as far away from subtlety as possible. Most of the campaign photography shows a tangle of skin interspersed with a suit here and there. Models passionately embrace each other, tossing out all norms of physical distancing.
Leadership at the company responded to the internet’s uproar by feigning innocence: “We wanted to show a positive outlook on a future where people can get back together and get close again,” SuitSupply founder Fokke de Jong told the New York Times. The campaign is sure to inspire emotion in viewers and stir up conversation, one way or another. On Twitter, public perception ranged from general disgust to cautious praise; although the campaign is saucy, it represents an intense and diverse kind of connection that many consumers can relate to.
OKCupid: Every Single Person
OKCupid is considered an old school dating platform by many measures — it predates more recent app stars like Bumble and Tinder by almost a decade. That way-back-when image has made it absolutely critical for the company to push the envelope and take a stand, or risk falling into oblivion. So this summer, OKCupid became the first dating app to offer users a variety of options to choose from when identifying sexuality and gender.
The company’s corresponding “Every Single Person” campaign celebrates that diversity with a little wordplay fun. The campaign features two people’s tongues united as one, trees growing out of boxer shorts, and cuddlers with ladder-like arrangements of body parts, to name a few iterations. By welcoming every single person — from non-binary folks to romantics and vaxxers to bears — and every person who is single, OKCupid combines the public’s desire to get back out there post-COVID with a vision of a more inclusive, accepting society.
With the rise of COVID-19 variants, 2021 was less carefree than consumers and brands alike anticipated. Even so, campaigns like these have memorialized consumers’ aspirations and the on-again-off-again nature of post-pandemic recovery. They keep hope alive for when COVID concerns are eventually behind us once and for all.