Wising Up: Top Gun Marketing and the Wild Ride Ahead

At exactly this time last year, my team and I were putting the final touches on our 2020 Marketing plans and gearing up to rollout Fullscreen’s 2nd Culture Report aptly titled “Time To Hit The Reset.” Based on the WHO’s revised definition of “burnout” from a state of exhaustion to a syndrome tied to “chronic workplace stress that has not been managed,” we were at the forefront of predicting people’s needs to hit a hard reset and recalibrate what was important to them. 

Fast forward, one year later and here we are. The year of the reset became the year of the pivot as we lit a match to our Marketing playbooks and went further into overdrive.

With the painful, soul-shaking, yet remarkable year of 2020 coming to a close, recounting lessons learned feels like an understatement. This has been a year of shared travesty and new bonds forged in basic human necessities — a year beyond lessons. It’s created an environment for us to contemplate wisdom. Stare-at-the-flames, question-the-stars, what’s-it-all-mean wisdom.

At work, teams got real — brainstorming and executing real-time business improvisations not only to salvage bottom lines, but to genuinely reach out to our fellow humans feeling vulnerable and lost. An urge to value each other, connect, find moments to smile, and to create messages that resonate in the deepest parts of us gained breathtaking momentum as months in isolation took their toll. 

We’ll return to this, but first, let’s rewind.

At the Start, Answering Emergency Meant Breaking the Rules

In late January 2020, the WHO issued a Global Health Emergency due to the novel coronavirus spreading across the planet. By February 2, global air travel was restricted while the Superbowl kicked off, not only the mothership of American sports, but perhaps the most exciting and creative annual brand event in marketing. One of the ads leveraged a prized kind of emotional sourcing: untapped, profound nostalgia. After 34 years, Top Gun was coming back. So momentous a brand and experience was this fighter pilot Tom Cruise movie that it could be teased more than a year in advance.

An iconic Top Gun trope sums up what businesses that survived — even flipped the script — did when confronted with COVID-19: they executed Cruise’s Cobra Maneuver (3:15). The pilot pulls back dramatically, the plane goes vertical for a moment, and roles with the enemy plane are reversed. It’s the hardest of moves, a deliberate braking when destruction is imminent, a loss of speed, but not altitude, that creates an unexpected new and advantageous position. It’s the ultimate pivot.  

This is exactly what it felt like for businesses, brands, and marketers this February. Pivoting to answer catastrophe meant we had to boldly break rules. It meant not shying away from smart action you know in your gut is the right thing to do, even while others exclaim, “You’re going to do what?!”  Paramount’s Top Gun 2 ad didn’t deliberately offer an analogy for a pandemic response, but it did offer a reminder of timeless and prescient wisdom.

Brands That Won Maneuvered Hard Into Empathy

As the pandemic worsened, social issues around truth and justice swept the U.S., exposing massive fissures endemic in the American people’s behavior, morality, and ideologies. 

To answer, the most successful marketers roared to a stop midair, trusted what was deep in our guts, and resumed flight in a daring, new position. No one can pretend business norms work well when fundamentals are breaking down. That requires, instead, attention to those fundamentals. We saw successful brands pivot dramatically to lift love, embrace unconditional friendship, extend a helping hand, offer interactive escape, and champion justice. They’re not new ideas, but positioning them front and center is what ultimately resonated with shaken and vulnerable consumers.

Loneliness is Serious and Love Matters

By the end of March, the pandemic’s harsh impact on daily life, work, and socializing was becoming apparent, with no end in sight. Restaurants and bars closed. Concerts stopped. The psychological fallout manifested in a variety of ways, but especially devastating was the amplification of loneliness. For many without an affirmative long-term partnership, the physical cut off from human contact felt brutal.

A beer responded masterfully to address the love and dating issues on everyone’s minds while also leveraging a new social media audience of 3.8 million. Tapping into the cultural zeitgeist of popular Netflix series Love Is Blind, Stella Artois recruited influencers Lauren Speed-Hamilton and Cameron Hamilton, who had never seen each other prior to their own engagement on the show. They promoted a contest that would give another lucky quarantine couple a $30K dream wedding ensuring that love persisted in the time of coronavirus.

The Unconditional Bond Between Humans and Pets

In many homes, our cats, dogs, and other pets are keenly in tune with the emotional state of us humans. They miss us purely and completely when we’re gone for the day. With the pandemic forcing many to work from home, interest in pets is at an all-time high. An especially hopeful development in the pet space is what could reasonably be called Dog as a Service (DaaS?!). Yes, really. Established to correct a broken system of dog breeding and placement, Good Dog is a platform making headway on socials that helps people get dogs from ethical sources and helps reputable breeders, shelters, and rescues put their dogs in good homes.

People leaned on their furry best friends for unconditional support and we, in turn, doted on them, driving soaring online sales across every metric of pet product. Ollie and Smalls, delivering human-grade dog and cat food via subscription service, seized the DTC moment. They’re part of the rise in well-funded, small CPG businesses focused on organic goodness and challenging a market long dominated by Mars and Nestle. Scary Mommy, one of the largest, millennial-mom influencer sites out there, raved about Ollie’s super fresh, pure food for her quarantine-adopted pup, Rocky. And programs like “Foster with Smalls” meant free, healthy pet food for those taking in dogs and cats during the pandemic — and earned media spots. 

Harnessing Expertise to Give Back Meaningfully

By the summer, psychological and dire economic consequences were evident everywhere, but especially for small businesses. Many had no path for pivot or just didn’t know where to start. At Fullscreen, we ourselves had family members, loved ones and friends who were small business owners struggling to survive. 

Our Fullscreen family came together to ideate initiatives that would add value to our communities, specifically for small business owners. We came up with a free Social Media Playbook for Small Business. Across every department, Fullscreeners collaborated at record speeds to produce a detailed manual for entrepreneurs to leverage social media for their businesses as a means of connecting with their communities, as social distancing became the norm. The guide includes everything from how to define your audience, positioning and voice, identifying the right platforms to use, and media buying and measurement to ensure that small businesses could quickly ramp up on the power of social media. 

Since then we’ve shared the playbook with thousands of small business organizations, hosted webinars, and even partnered with AT&T Business to create a 5-part content marketing series for their small business customers. 

Self-Protection and Interactive Escape

The pandemic and repeated social injustices have psychological weight. Self-care by escaping into interactive games, stories, art, and levity of every kind have become key coping mechanisms in keeping people mentally healthy. 

Brands have used gamification to draw in consumer-users online certainly before 2020’s crises, but the value of gamification this year has been especially compelling because it’s a tool to reach people where they’re at. Giving people some moments of interactive fun also gives them a sense of relief and balance. Snapchat employed gamification with social good in mind, not as an escape per se from COVID-19, but as a way of making it manageable and providing a kinetic experience in the process of doing that. The brand launched two new Augmented Reality (AR) lenses that encourage social distancing and the importance of handwashing. Snapchat noted that the new feature “gives help and support to people stressed out because of coronavirus-related fears.”

Speaking Up and Taking Action for Justice

Ben & Jerry’s has been unapologetically and fiercely engaged this year, which is not surprising given the brand’s history of activism. In addition to the crush of the pandemic, our nation has had to grapple with its ghosts and a streak of racist malevolence that is still very much alive and sadly widespread. By lifting the Black Lives Matter movement and calling out vindictive responses to it, the brand has gone all in to ask Americans to care.

Because of its long-standing work in cultivating public good as well as ice cream flavors, Ben & Jerry’s efforts as a commercial ally to social justice advocates are viewed with sincerity by most. Its ice cream is exceptional, maybe because of the hundreds of local farms it leverages, maybe because it mainly uses natural ingredients, but maybe too because of the brand’s consistent refusal to stand by idly while bad things happen. Ben & Jerry’s has been clear in sharing that cognitive dissonance, willful misunderstanding, misinformation, and missed points are unacceptable when basic human rights are on the line. 

Resetting for the New Year with Wisdom

So where does that leave us? Marketing and brand wisdom for 2021 comes from 2020’s examples of what’s taken root deep inside of us. That’s making a hopeful, concrete difference through action, setting an example for others, and mantras to:

• Be real, then go forth boldly, armed with fundamentals that honor what matters to people most in a crisis — love and human contact, pets as family members, giving back in a direct way, occupying our minds with lighter matters and interactivity, and being brave in the face of dishonesty and oppression. Show the vulnerability and willingness to meet the consumer as a person. We’ve all been in the thick of this together and it’s not over yet.
• Develop multiple “Plan Bs” as training maneuvers that can be deployed when it counts. The world is asserting its unpredictability. We don’t have systems that positively won’t fail. Be prepared to truly go against that grain of normal process and long-term planning if necessary. We’ll need to have both the long-term plan and multiple short-term plans and be ready to quickly maneuver between them. Clever thinking on our feet is a skill derived from considering many alternatives. Unexpected moves that quickly reorient us into a stable position are good in aviation and good in marketing.
• Empower smart people willing to step up. Ditch red tape approvals. It’s always wise to surround ourselves with really good, smart people, to trust in them, and empower them to move quickly. Allow them to demonstrate a vision and strategy then take the bold step, rather than tangling them in organizational bureaucracy, red tape, and approvals in order to get something done. People must have the freedom to be nimble, to be able to seize opportunities to take action at the most opportune moments when the stakes are high and the impact is great.

As we head into the New Year, let’s learn from 2020, from all its Cobra Maneuvers reorienting us to empathy. Carrying that wisdom forward as Marketers will help shape the prosperous and equitable world we all desire.