08


Spring 2020


COVER STORY


the education was a roundabout way of keeping photographers busy doing something productive, while at the same time giving us the ability to capture accounts.” Free accounts equal free highly qualified


marketing lists, and although the PPA team hasn’t had time to mine the analytics of the site, they are tracking it and will dig into the information in the near future. Not surprisingly, the resources the team at PPA decided to offer after hearing from members—perks such as free educational sessions that were normally available only to their paying members— created goodwill and built an unexpected pipeline for new member leads in the future. It has provided PPA with a list of photographers to whom they can start marketing their core benefits. That strategy should give them a running start in a post-pandemic world, when much of their efforts will surely be focused on pulling their membership numbers back up to where they were. “We are a membership-based organization, so without members, we would cease to exist,” Trust says. “But we have stopped traditional membership recruiting for now, partly because it would certainly seem to be in bad taste, but also


because there is a limit to everyone’s messaging bandwidth, and anything we say or do would likely fall on deaf ears anyway. It’s like that strip mall you drive past in your hometown a million times, never noticing the stores. Then, when Grandma needs a hearing aid, you realize there is a hearing aid center right there. The point is, we hear messaging when something in our lives prepares us to hear it. So, traditional membership recruiting would not only be in bad taste right now, it would also be mostly invisible.” How will the COVID-19 crisis of 2020


shape the short- and long-term future of businesses? Trust, for one, is confident that it will reaffirm the importance of brand equity and building trust among customers, or, in their case, members. Of course, that can’t be


“Building faith takes proof of performance on our part…This is our chance to etch ourselves into their hearts.”


Predicting the post- COVID-19 future is impossible, but looking back may shed some light on the types of strategies that stand the test of turbulent times, and delivering value is a proven formula.


built overnight, but he believes that challenging times such as these shorten the timeline. “Building faith takes proof of performance


on our part,” Trust says. “People are looking for leadership. They want organizations that can speak to them honestly even if the news is not good, and at the same time help them see that the future is bright. This is our chance to etch ourselves into their hearts.” For PPA, that equates to a slightly different


approach once we all emerge from this crisis. In the short term, the organization will continue to offer messages of help and hope even after we all venture out from our homes and are back at work. They will also refrain from selling too aggressively. “How long will that period be? I don’t


know yet, but I think consumers are going to feel pretty raw and vulnerable for a while,” Trust says. “However, as long as there are no surprises in how long this takes us to pull out of it, by the time the holidays roll around, I would say that most messaging will be back to normal.” While PPA has shifted its marketing


message, it has not changed the vehicles it uses to deliver that message—email, house ads in their own publication, paid ads in other publications, and a wealth of social media and paid strategic influencer activations. When


www.ppa.com/inittogether


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