Marketing After Disasters

Marketing can be hard to do when things are changing at such a fast pace.  It gets even trickier when a company has to deal with sensitive subjects.  In today's world, everything can be a sensitive topic for different people.  Especially right now at this moment there are tough things going on. People are losing their lives, homes, friends, and even families.  So this can be a complicated time for companies to market themselves when people are going through horrific things.   

Businesses can't just stop what they're doing, wait for these disasters to be cleaned up and then start back up.  They are responsible to their shareholders and so much more to continue and try to profit as much as they possibly can.  For example, businesses and even the government are currently trying to market the state of Florida.  Tourism is a big economic driver in Florida.  So to get tourist to come back after Irma hit is the current challenge that they are facing.  This is something that they have to do very carefully to not upset people that still haven't recovered from the hurricane.

Visit Florida is a company working with the government to get tourist heading back into Florida.  Their slogan is "sunshine, blue skies and good times."  This is a perfect way to market Florida at this particular point in time.  Florida is the Sunshine State, so this slogan plays off of that.  They also want people to know that the storm is over and there are blue skies.  Most likely when people are picturing Florida in their head at this moment, their thinking of the hurricane and the damage that it caused.  This slogan says, all of that is gone and over with and now there are blue skies instead of gray.  And finally, they highlight that you can have a good time if you come to Florida.  Everything with the hurricane is over and you can enjoy yourself when you come to visit Florida.

This is a great example of how to market a place or business after a horrible event.  Timing is one thing that has to be perfect when running a campaign like this.  Visit Florida wouldn't want to run this campaign if there was another hurricane on the way.  Or if the clean up effort was going on and people weren't ready for tourist to come visit the state.  Marketers in Las Vegas are going to have to figure out what they can do to help the victims and the companies they work for.  Also, you don't want to do something dumb and offend a lot of people.  So marketers have to be extremely careful about what they do pertaining to the awful events that occurred and when they do it.