In June, every brand email in my inbox was a celebration. "We're back!" "Summer is HERE!" "See you IRL!" Confetti energy. Main character energy. Hot Vax Summer energy.
In June, every brand email in my inbox was a celebration.
By late July, those same brands were quietly deleting their "masks off" social posts and pivoting back to "we're in this together" language like nothing happened. The tonal whiplash has been extraordinary.
I have been in brand strategy long enough to know that the hardest thing for any organization to do is match their external messaging to a rapidly shifting reality. But Delta has exposed something deeper: most brands do not have a communication framework that accounts for uncertainty.
They have a crisis playbook. They have a celebration playbook. They have nothing for the purgatory in between.
This is the white space that fascinates me. How do you communicate with your audience when you genuinely do not know what next week looks like? When "We're back!" might age like milk in 72 hours?
Some brands are handling this beautifully. Trader Joe's quietly reinstated their mask policy without a dramatic announcement or a guilt trip. They just did it. No seven-paragraph Instagram post about their values. No press release. Just a sign on the door. That is confidence.
Others are drowning in their own hedging. "As the situation evolves, we continue to monitor..." is not a communication strategy. It is a legal team's fever dream masquerading as empathy.
Here is what I think the answer is, and it is deceptively simple: say what you know, say what you do not know, and say what you are going to do about it.
That is it. Three sentences. Your audience does not need you to predict the future. They need you to be honest about the present.
The brands that will emerge from this era with the most goodwill are the ones that stopped pretending they had all the answers. The ones that said "this is confusing for us too, here is what we are doing today, we will update you when things change."
Certainty is a luxury none of us have right now. But clarity? Clarity is always available. And your audience can tell the difference between a brand that is being clear and a brand that is performing confidence it does not actually have.
My cat just sneezed and I instinctively checked if she was wearing a mask. This is where we are. This is the context your brand is operating in. Plan accordingly.