You must consider four dimensions of context to judge what your tone should be right now:

What just happened: Create a means of constantly monitoring the situation and assign a team to be your “Control Tower.” They must assess the facts, the data, the news, the fake news, the social conversation, and the reactions of your employees in real-time and be prepared to take action.

What might happen next: Invent a consistent methodology for scenario-planning for what lies ahead. From predictive analytics to engaging experts, you must have a view for how events will unfold and what it will mean for your people.

People: This is the most important. It’s critical to understand how all your different stakeholders will feel and how their mood will affect their behavior—and their assessment of yours. Mood will vary from frontline participants to distant observers, but you must account for all. During times of trouble, lasting impressions are made that shape the mid-term future of your brand and how people will continue to think of your business after the troubles subside. Evidence shows this from past events. So, hitting the right tone at the right time will be crucial. And not being heard at all might be even more damaging.

Channel: Finally, you must think of the channel within which your message will be delivered because that also affects the mood of the receiver. A pop station on Spotify sets a different tone than a political podcast on Apple Podcasts.

What does success look like, then? As marketers and communicators, we can learn from the past. Here is the example of Rosie the Riveter: This is the poster we all remember. The tone is optimistic, empowering, and assertive. But it actually appeared for only two weeks on the walls of Westinghouse factories.

The posters that actually resonated in the moment and captured the mood looked more like this:

The reason that we now remember Rosie is that she resurfaced and resonated with the mood of the feminist movement in the early 80s, and that is when the Rosie poster really came to the fore and has stayed in the memory since then.

Another example is the more recent experience with COVID-19. The fear in the beginning of the pandemic made many pull back positive, happy-toned advertising and messaging. Then came the spate of messaging celebrating the frontline workers reflecting the reality of being “in this together.” And then brands began to be more positive and reinforce the fact that they would be there when the world returned “to normal.” The context for these three phases? News in the first, first-hand reporting on social in the second, and the vaccine rollout in the third.

Those businesses that are coming through the pandemic in a better place were the ones that got the message just right in the moment, and then changed their messaging as the moods ebbed and flowed. The same approach needs to be taken today with the situation unfolding in Ukraine.