Despite the overwhelming number of choices Americans have at the supermarket, loyalty to their favorite brands is fierce. In fact, 82% of American adults are loyal to specific product brands, and 43% spend more on those beloved brands. Even more impressive, 77% of consumers claim to have been loyal to a particular brand for over 10 years! Trends come and go, life phases change, and the world changes dramatically, but still, most people have a favorite brand they stick to.

But what about in crises like COVID-19? What about when products are harder to find or people need to change their buying habits to adjust? The shifts in retail operations during these unusual times present unprecedented trials and opportunities, for both challenger brands trying to forge new customer relationships and legacy brands looking to nurture and deepen the bonds they already have going with their customers — especially when it comes to marketing decisions. Let’s take a look at what’s at stake for brands with varying degrees of customer loyalty, and how Out of Home (OOH) marketing can keep brands top-of-mind.

The Opportunity For Challengers: Grow Market Share

The good news for challengers in all of this is that windows of opportunity are opening in markets that have long been practically impenetrable due to brand loyalty. Many preferred brands, even and especially when it comes to staples like personal care items and pantry basics, have had windows of unavailability during the crisis. This means shoppers are forced to try something new; driven by necessity to give other brands a shot, something challengers usually devote huge swaths of their marketing budgets to facilitate.

The Opportunity For Legacy Brands: Strengthen Emotional Bonds

For brands that already have a highly loyal customer base, this crisis is a chance to deepen the emotional bond with their customers with powerful, timely messaging. Customers who have an emotional bond with a brand or product spend more than 3X on that product over their lifetime than those who don’t, and recommend that company 71% of the time, versus the average loyal referral rate of 45%. Additionally, emotionally linked customers spend more than twice as much annually on those products.

Even if your products have at times been sold out or otherwise unavailable during the crisis, it’s still a smart marketing spend to send messages of support, compassion and togetherness during this time, or to remind customers of ways that you’ve been an integral part of their family lives for years. It is, perhaps, *especially* important to push such messaging when competitors have the opening described above.

“This is a moment to really, what I would call it, attack the market and be strong in the second half of the year… we are shifting a lot of our investment to working media” —Dirk Van de Put, Chairman and CEO, Mondelez International

OOH Marketing In The Time Of COVID-19

Strategic OOH can be the last point of contact with a consumer before they enter a store. This plays into a psychological concept known as the availability heuristic, which states that people make decisions based on the first information that comes to mind, often the most recently acquired information. According to the theory of availability heuristic, if a consumer is choosing between two options at the grocery store, the billboard they saw on their drive in is in the forefront of their mind, and will disproportionately impact their buying decisions.

So for both established brands and newcomers, there’s a lot at stake when it comes to customer loyalty. Marketing teams should be clearly defining their goals — to grow or maintain loyalty — and take this rare opportunity to offer special support to shoppers. Impactful storytelling through OOH ads can keep brands top-of-mind for shoppers, whether that means stepping up in a time of retail fluctuation or staying present in their consumers’ lives.

Ran Ben-Yair is the Co-Founder of Ubimo, an Out-of-Home technology company recently acquired by Quotient. Prior to Ubimo, Ben-Yair co-founded LabPixies Ltd. (acquired by Google in 2010), a leading web and mobile app development company, growing the business to reach tens of millions of users in four years. At Google, he continued as a Product Manager in Search where he led and launched large scale products. Ben-Yair holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel and currently resides in New York.