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Ceren Özay Uz – Marketing and Public Relations Specialist
(Taken from Anlık Normal Dergi)
The year 2020 opened a brand new page in communication and marketing studies! We had to forget all we knew!
We left behind an iconic year in which the rules were broken and rewritten in corporate communication, marketing communication and crisis communication. For the first time in our careers, many of us have experienced throwing away and reconstructing our annual communication plans over and over in the same year. We stopped communicating through our institutions or products and focused on “Values”, and we tried to overcome difficulties by working hand in hand with even our arch-rivals, with whom we have never been side by side. As we rediscovered the power of "Solidarity", the concept of "Sustainability" has become our only reality, the key to our survival.
In an ordinary year, when any of these things happened to us, we should have stopped our communication in traditional and digital media for days.
year 2020; It even surpassed 1666, which is called "Antichrist Year," with a chain of events that are not comparable to blockbuster horror and science fiction movies. While 1666 was the scene of a wide range of disasters, from the plague epidemic to the great fire of London, famine and even unprecedented riots, word of mouth spread as the Year of the Antichrist. After these disasters, all the inhabitants of the world who were able to save their lives, of course, awoke to the day of January 1, 1667.
We have witnessed a year 2020 that gives us candles for the year of the Antichrist. In our country, we have experienced horror with the disasters that followed one after the other. After the avalanche disaster in Van at the beginning of the year, we received the news of the earthquake from Elazig. While we could not get over the horror of the flood in Giresun, our worst nightmare returned and we experienced the earthquake in İzmir again. It was not enough, our lungs drowned in the fires in Çanakkale and Hatay. All year long, the Covid-19 epidemic and its burning effects kept turning around in the background.
We, as communicators, have tried to keep in touch with our target audiences by forgetting all we know in fear of an endless cycle of natural disasters and pandemics. While we had to stop our communication in traditional and digital media for days when any of these things happened to us in an ordinary year, we sought ways to share the feelings of our target audiences, to be a salve to wounds as much as our business field allows, to keep our industry alive by increasing elbow contact with our stakeholders like never before.
THE NEW ROADMAP OF COMMUNICATORS: SUSTAINABILITY
Whether we are responsible for the communication activities of public institutions, non-governmental organizations, professional organizations, trade unions or private institutions, we have to make “Sustainability” the most important focus of our 2021 agenda. In this context, our duty is to ensure that the philosophy of sustainability becomes entrenched in our institutions and that every step is taken after a decision is made from a sustainability perspective. The sustainability approach generally parallels the nature of traditional public relations activities. If we define public relations activities as establishing and developing a relationship of trust based on long-term sincerity with all target audiences of institutions and organizations, its parallelism with the sustainability discipline easily emerges.
As communicators, besides the methods such as SWOT, which we have been analyzing our institution for years, with analyzes such as PESTEL or DESTEP; We analyze the atmosphere of our institutions in terms of political, economic, social/cultural, environmental/ecological, technological, demographic and even legal aspects, and we plan our communication activities by considering all these dynamics. The concept of sustainability is based on the efforts to improve the performance of our institutions in this field by analyzing the area in which we operate economically, socially and environmentally with the 17 sustainable development goals of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the indicators of the GRI Global Reporting Initiative.
The idea of sustainability, which emerged in the 1960s, reached maturity by making a series of important leaps such as the "UN Habitat Conference" held in Istanbul in 1996, the "Kyoto Environment Protocol" that created a great sensation in the international arena in 1997, and the "Sustainable Development Goals" announced in 2015. reached the level. The occurrence of risks threatening the continuity of the world throughout this whole process has enabled us to develop an alternative behavior with sustainability awareness. The sustainability approach has enabled us to develop a solution-oriented perspective instead of making a decision in the face of threats or leaving the future of the initiatives we are in to fate. Sustainability also gave us the opportunity to correctly identify the source of the problems and be a part of the solution.