An examination on the advertising strategies of brands during the Covid-19 pandemic in the context of crisis communication

In the 21st century, the rapid spread of a virus by infecting all countries has left the entire world faced with a global crisis. This situation has echoed all over the world as the Covid-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, some measures were taken, and as a result, several effects were observed in both sociological and psychological fields. It is a fact that the Covid-19 pandemic also affects brand advertisements. For this reason, it is an important research topic what kind of changes brands make in their advertisements during the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on this, within the scope of the research, the brands mostly preferred to use during the Covid-19 pandemic period; It aims to determine advertising themes, advertising appeals, narrative style, narrative format, creative strategy, main message strategy, sub-message strategy, and message tone. For this purpose, some categories were determined and then coded twice in the SPSS 26 program. The TV commercials of brands from 10 different sectors operating in Turkey make up the sample for the research. The determined commercials were analyzed within the framework of the content analysis technique, one of the qualitative data analysis methods. The results show that the most used theme is separation, the most used attraction is an emotional appeal, the most used narrative style is emotional, the most preferred narrative format is presenter, the most used creative strategy is emotional; positioning strategy, and the most preferred primary message strategy, is the transformational strategy. The most used sub-message strategy is the sensory strategy, and the most used message tone is the emotional tone. As a result, it has been seen that brands that want to benefit from the crisis do not remain indifferent to a negative situation in society and attempt to show that they are on the side of society through advertisements.