Abstract
This paper focuses on the way in which small and medium-sized businesses in Flanders adapted communication with their customers during the economic lockdown in March–May 2020. It documents, more specifically, how shops tried to maintain, re-establish, or even re-invent communication with their customers during this two-month period. Based on pictures of shop windows in a Flemish city, we analyze the (semi-)commercial messages that appeared in this setting during this period. This analysis adopts an interdisciplinary perspective, in which a cognitive linguistic approach is integrated with analyses and practical advices by marketing agencies. Despite their orientation towards distinct, theoretical and practical goals, both approaches share an analytical interest in mapping participants and their mutual relationship as part of a communicative interaction. In the period of economic lockdown, marketers urged shop owners to ‘humanize’ their business strategy by downplaying content-related issues in favor of maximal social outreach towards customers. Considering this advice, it was hypothesized that under these circumstances participants in commercial transactions would be construed much more prominently, presenting themselves and each other as unprecedented empathetic business personas. Much of our data comply with this expectation, thus providing empirical evidence of a subjectified communicative ground, in which both buyer and seller personas figure with augmented prominence as parts of the object of conceptualization. Messages include, among other things, expressions of empathy, solidarity, combativity, but also creativity and humor thus incorporating a new type of humanized business communication. With respect to the analysis of marketing strategies, the collected data at the same time instantiate and legitimize marketers’ communication advice about humanizing one’s business exchange.
Highlights
March 2020, Belgium, just like major parts of Europe and the world, faced a rapid increase of infections with the COVID-19 coronavirus among its population
In line with the methodological steps laid out by modern linguistic landscape research (Gorter 2018), our approach is based on multiple pictures of shop windows in the Flemish city of Leuven, in which we analyzed thecommercial messages that appeared in this specific setting during this period
We describe eighteen cases illustrating this humanized business communication and which in technical terms of underlying linguistic construal operations can be identified as instances of subjectification or—in case the increased focus on the communicative ground is reflected by linguistic sanctioning—objectification
Summary
March 2020, Belgium, just like major parts of Europe and the world, faced a rapid increase of infections with the COVID-19 coronavirus among its population. At the core of their advice, marketers argued in terms of humanizing one’s business strategy by downplaying content-related issues in favor of maximizing social outreach expressing genuine involvement in empathetic, supportive, engaged, trustworthy and credible behavior Considering this advice, it might be expected that compared to the pre-coronavirus period, both buyer and seller personas—mutually assumed key participants in the business process and as such members of the communicative ground in this type of interaction—be construed much more prominently, revealing themselves as empathetic business personas. On the level of local, off-line shops and businesses, our small-scale study provides empirical evidence demonstrating a fundamental shift in business communication at an early stage of the first lockdown in Spring 2020 It shows, more precisely, how in this specific period of time product-oriented brand communication, considered the mainstream type of business communication in pre-COVID days, is relieved by a different type of communication, which plays on general human values like empathy and solidarity, which in pre-COVID times instantiated an atypical model of business communication.
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