We’re Here for You: The Unsolicited Covid-19 Email

Six years ago, a few months before we got married, Ryan decided to order ties for his groomsmen from an online company called Bows ‘n Ties. We put the order in, had our wedding, and moved on with our lives. The ties were great, but it was not like we exchanged Christmas cards, let them know when our baby was born, or ordered a special tie for Ryan’s first Father’s Day. We didn’t even sign up for their email coupons because neither of us are exactly frequent tie buyers. In short, we never heard from each other again.

That is, until a few weeks ago, when Bows-n-Ties popped back into our inboxes. A few days after we had received news that campuses around the country would be closing for the rest of the semester and that we should shelter in place, Bows ‘n Ties sent Ryan an email to let him know that the company was here for him (personal communication, March 20, 2020).

It was not the only such email we received. Next up was an email from Stitch Fix, a mail-order clothing company I tried once, to let me know that its relationship with me is “what is keeping [them] going, literally and emotionally” and that I should reach out “if [I] need anything or just want to say hello” (personal communication, March 21, 2020). Then, another email came in from the CEO of Backblaze, the company I use to back up the data on my external hard drive, lamenting that “the next few months are going to be hard on most people, but we can get through this” (personal communication, March 24, 2020). And then one came from PetMeds, the pet medication website we use to order our cats’ deworming serum, wanting us to know that they are here for us—and especially our furry family members (personal communication, March 25, 2020). All of these companies told a personal story about how they are getting through the most challenging days, outlined their current safety precautions, mentioned that we can still order their products online, and, most important, emphasized that they are here for us and that we will overcome the Covid-19 pandemic together (or as the CEO of Backblaze quipped, “together while apart”).

Why, we wondered, were they telling us this? Does Stitch Fix really want me to call just to say hello? Is PetMeds really there for our orange tabby? And perhaps even more important, what kind of implicit assumptions about our lives and livelihoods during an emerging global pandemic were these companies making in sending us these emails? As the days went on, we felt more and more uncomfortable receiving email after email with the exact same rhetorical move—“we’re here for you”—in each one.

Scholars in crisis communication have noted that companies often directly correspond with consumers via email in times of crisis, particularly in a post-911 world (George & Pratt, 2012). On one hand, it seems important in a public health crisis that some companies, such as a hair salon or gym, communicate their safety precautions and let their clients know that they are operating under the most stringent World Health Organization guidelines. But the Covid-19 pandemic has brought on an unprecedented flood of heartfelt pep talks reassuring customers that they are not alone, which suggests an entirely different kairotic harnessing of the power of email messaging. This unnervingly personal type of email, a rapidly developing email marketing genre, marks the beginning of a paradigm shift in how organizations connect with consumers during times of crisis —and echoes what Heschler (1997) called, more than 20 years ago, a “transformation of the fundamental generic conventions by which communities constitute themselves” (p. 27). In the case of reaching out to consumers during a crisis, maintaining a brand relationship (albeit by generating a false sense of empathy) with the consumer is key, especially in a time when more people seem to be shopping online than ever before.

Genre scholars such as Devitt (2000) and others have long argued that genres respond to and, in the same vein, construct recurrent rhetorical situations. In the weeks following stay-at-home orders in the United States due to the outbreak of Covid-19, the “we’re here for you” (WHFY) email became a mainstay in inboxes. While there has not yet been time to collect detailed figures on the frequency of these emails, recent articles published by online magazines such as Slate, as well as a trending topic on Twitter, indicate a surge in these emails in the middle of March, just as most people were being told to stay at home by supervisors and governors. Schwedel’s (2020) piece in Slate recognizes several different categories of consumer responses to this email, including uncertainty (“Uh, OK, Thanks for letting me know?”), resentment (“badly timed sales pitches”), surprise (“Wait, who?”), and satisfaction (“strangely comforting”), suggesting that an emerging set of generic features that constrain, shape, and construct the messaging are forming around this unique rhetorical situation. What has not been discussed, however, is the fact that when almost every company uses the same rhetorical move in trying to maintain a relationship with its buyers, the words themselves become empty harbingers of a message that so many people do need to hear as they are sequestered in their homes in isolation. In the case of the coronavirus, corporate messaging has shifted to an uncomfortable effort to elicit a shared sense of emotional togetherness in a time when no one is physically together at all.

In business writing circles, emerging rhetorical situations often imply forms of “social transformation,” indicating that new conventions correspond to shifts in the application of genres (Heschler, 1997). In the Covid-19 era, the WHFY email appears to be an external form of marketing communication that fulfills various goals of brand differentiation and affirms corporate social responsibility (CSR) during a moment of unprecedented and rapid social change. Because so many consumers suddenly find themselves at home and making purchases online, this email brings a company’s product to the top of our minds by establishing itself at the top of our inboxes. It often resembles a form of CSR messaging by amplifying safety recommendations from the CDC and assuring consumers that additional precautions are being taken at factories and offices for the safety of employees (Gruber et al., 2017). For this reason, in Schwedel’s terms, the email’s sales pitch is badly timed, as offering a discount or special promotion seems rhetorically at odds with comforting customers with the assurance that they, too, will survive a global pandemic.

But one of the more interesting generic features of the WHFY email is not necessarily related to CSR or discounted prices. It does not lie in the list of hygienic precautions that the company is taking to ensure the safety of its employees and products or of how many boxes of pet medications I can buy at a discounted rate; instead, the most successful features of this genre are the oddly comforting ones, often marked by the inclusive “we” pronoun or a personal anecdote. I am struck by, for example, the image of Gleb Budman, the CEO of Backblaze, getting together with his colleagues every morning for “Brewtiful Mornings,” 15-minute videochats—over coffee (or tea)—to properly kick off the work day (personal communication, March 24, 2020), or of Katrina Lake, founder and CEO of Stitch Fix, now styling clients from her home, where she is sheltering in place with her husband, an investment professional, and their two young sons (personal communication, March 21, 2020). These activities are, for many privileged American consumers, exactly what they are doing during the Covid-19 pandemic—connecting over technology (some for the first time), finding creative ways to pass the time with friends and family, and finding a balance between working from home and raising kids. For reasons that extend past simply reinforcing a company’s ethos, these rhetorical gestures let us know that a global crisis does not leave a single person—whether that person is one of America’s richest female entrepreneurs or a college composition teacher—untouched.

Of course, only time will tell if the WHFY email is the new crisis email. But the widespread adoption of this term likely prophecies similar corporate communication in the event of future pandemics. Given what some journalists believe to be the most effective strand of the WHFY email (Schwedel, 2020), future crisis emails will be most effective based on one of the oldest saws of rhetorical education: audience awareness. The emails that are being sent to large numbers of single-time purchasers, particularly for niche brands, do not seem to have the necessary history or loyalty with customers in order to achieve the kind of credibility they need; however, those sent to focused groups of frequent and loyal customers do appear to successfully achieve various communication goals, such as signaling compassion, explaining changes (in price, delivery, etc.), reinforcing the importance of belonging to a community of like-minded consumers, and validating our personal experiences by sharing theirs.

Although mirroring our own experiences back to us is one thing, the WHFY email, as we recently discovered, also marks an opportunity for companies to showcase new products they have created in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. We have an interesting addendum to our Bows ‘n Ties story. A few weeks after we received the first email from the company, we received another one. In case you are worried that your face mask will not match your bow tie, Bows ‘n Ties is now offering a preorder BOGO special on what it calls “stylish filter face masks” to match your ties, with new designs added each week (Bows ‘n Ties, 2020). The banner image on its home page is of a middle-aged white man wearing a three-piece suit, complete with an American-flag-printed bowtie and a matching face mask.