The foundation of the worldwide response to Coronavirus has been the race to vaccinate.

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Here Omar Hikal, CEO of The Brand Company, gives us his take on branding and the ways that it has influenced and been influenced by the pandemic.

There are few members of the global community who have not been touched in some way by the pandemic which has enveloped the planet since early 2020. It seems an eternity ago that we were hearing the initial reports from Wuhan of individual cases of unexplained illness. Since then, approaching six million lives have been tragically lost among 300 million cases, while lifestyles have changed beyond all recognition, possibly forever.

Covid-19 has swept the world in waves as new variants have evolved and circulated, with any temporary relief interrupted by mutations which have quickly and inevitably spread to dominate the news and healthcare agendas nationally and across the world, each fuelling a wide variety of measures from social distancing to national lockdowns.

Some may think it almost vulgar to suggest that a global catastrophe such as Covid-19 could be connected in any way to branding. But branding is all around us. Wherever we go and whatever we do, we encounter brands - often even without knowing it. Every time we pick up our phone, our laptop, go out for a run, or go for a drive, we're interacting with a brand. Like it or not, a global health event like the one we're currently experiencing is no exception. Since the start of the pandemic nearly two years ago and the subsequent drive to vaccinate, many new brands have entered the public consciousness. Pfizer. Astra-Zeneca. Moderna. Johnson & Johnson. Many of us will hear these names multiple times on any given day, and a significant proportion of the world's population will have had first-hand experience of their products.

Yet this awareness has been created without a snazzy logomark, a snappy slogan or a multi-media marketing campaign, to the end user at least. Look at the companies' websites. There are no cool animations on the homepage: you're taken straight to the heart of the matter. 'This is what we do, and this is how we do it'. We rarely hear from the drug companies behind the vaccines, yet their share prices are going through the roof. In the context of Covid, governments and their health agencies are doing this work for them, essentially with the very simple message 'This product saves lives'.

Which on the face of it is about as persuasive as a message could be. But of course, it's not that simple.

Like the brands we’d never heard of until recently, ‘anti-vax’ has also become a term we now encounter on a regular basis. Vaccine hesitancy is of course a significant obstacle to widespread vaccination of populations, and there’s no ‘one size fits all’ explanation for this, which presents a major obstruction to administrations in their attempts to persuade those who may be reluctant. Research by the Poole College of Management at North Carolina State University has revealed 12 different vaccination promotion strategies, ranging from educational analogies to ‘FOMO’ (fear of missing out). In New York City citizens have been offered $100 to get vaccinated.

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But what works in one location may not be effective in another. Using Africa as an example, the Poole research suggests that whereas in Uganda the focus may be on equality, availability to all and the scarcity of vaccine supplies rendering them above corruption, in Nigera the vaccinated status of kings, chiefs and tribal leaders may be used to encourage its citizens to follow suit. But again, it falls to governments to 'sell' the product they opt for and to choose their messaging strategy, rather than those who make it.

The need for persuasion, and for devising strategies to ‘sell’ the benefits of vaccination are relatively recent developments. People of a certain age will I’m sure have vivid memories of visits to the local surgery or maybe the school nurse and queuing up to be jabbed against all sorts of diseases and viruses without anything much in the way of discussion or debate. And as a result, many diseases and viruses have been eliminated or largely eradicated, including polio and smallpox. But of course, this was before the internet and widespread use of social media, which both give opportunities for debate, discussion and shared experience which simply weren’t there before.

20 years ago, research apparently established a link between a vaccination against measles, mumps and rubella and autism in children. Although this gained significant traction, the research paper which made these claims was eventually discredited, but not before significant numbers of parents had opted not to vaccinate their children, leading to an escalation in measles cases. And this was in 2002. With so many platforms now available for the dissemination of opinion it’s not hard to see why vaccination rates in most countries are way off 100% when you add in cultural, religious and financial considerations.

There's also a geopolitical aspect to this scenario: it's not just 'big pharma'. Drugs are being manufactured all around the globe. There are accusations that the Oxford AstraZeneca formula was stolen by a Russian agent and used to create the Russian Sputnik jab. India manufactures vaccines under licence for drug companies for export to other countries, while it has been suggested that it may not be producing enough to meet the needs of its own people.

There have even been suggestions that the production process may be less rigorous in some countries than in others, but with little provided in the way of evidence.

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And finally, if you've been vaccinated, you could well have had a shot of Comirnaty, Covishield, Spikevax or Vaxevria. But these product names aren't widely publicised. With quoted efficacy rates generally in the 80% to 90% range, if we're happy to be vaccinated, any product will apparently skew the odds dramatically in our favour. The majority of us buy day-to-day generic drugs like paracetamol off the shelf in the supermarket without even thinking about who makes them. If we're unfortunate enough to become seriously ill, we'll generally take the treatment that the specialist recommends without question. Again, do we need to know who made 'our' vaccine? Whatever the answer, the pandemic has transformed numerous brands into household names without traditional advertising, messaging or marketing. Were it not for the back story, it would be perfect.