Lessons From the Recession: The New Marketing Rules
1. Listen Conduct more research and respond faster to your findings. When the market moves, you are ready to accommodate.
Speak to your customers, show empathy and be ready to adapt by proving your products or services are supportive. Customers will still spend – but in different ways.
Retain existing customers by offering long-term value. Increase your range and reach of value-added products. Test new markets with trial offers rather than cheap instant discounts.
2. Think deeper.
See Further …That doesn’t mean having endless marketing meetings drinking latte; it’s about becoming more adaptable.
Don’t be myopic.
Plan in terms of months and weeks, not quarters and years. The days of dusty ‘best practice’ are all but finished.
Use your initiative and encourage others to use theirs.
Don’t fall into the trap of being another fad brand by copying your competitors. Customers are trading down, sideways and, believe it or not, some even up!
Show differentiation by exploring solutions throughout the value chain. Rip up the old guidelines. Making your own strides to take several leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.
3.
Stop cutting yourself out of the picture
If you stop marketing, people may conclude that you are next recession victim. Competitors will increase their presence – simply by you not investing in yours.
Shake up your traditional marketing mix. Test channels in stages. Embrace your market through Web 2.0 initiatives such as video blogs and Tweets.
Invest firstly in understanding your message and its meaning and then only the appropriate media to deliver it.
The ‘us’ and ‘them’ culture is dead. Be inclusive. Make the most important people in your chain – customers and clients - feel valued by being part of a bigger brand experience. Like you, they want to be heard and acknowledged.
Everything is possible – providing it doesn’t compromise your brand’s integrity.
4.
Show that you are not full of hype
Too many believe that marketers are simply over-paid, over-hyped and over caffeinated manipulators.
That is so ‘yester-year’. This is the age of reasoning and responsibility. Make your innovative advertising messages more direct and intelligent. Produce creative work that draws a smile of satisfaction in people’s mind. Customers have neither the patience nor inclination to put up with self-indulgent messages full of great puff and little substance.
If you have a strong product or service – don’t rely on ‘fluff’ to sell the ‘sizzle’. Don’t treat people as mass herds; make the feel like shepherds of their own destiny.
5.
Do – prove - act
Careers progression relying on membership of exclusive clubs went out with the fall of Reginald Perrin.
‘Deliver and Demonstrate’ rather than ‘promise and pontificate’.
Think stature - not status. Stay informed with industry developments but don’t kid yourself that paper qualifications alone build solid shelters. If you are an agency, be brave, become a pro-active lion, rather than a cut and paste ‘monkey’. Revisit briefs. Do they need more pep… a different direction? Are you delivering discernable value? Work with sales teams – not against them. Get more people involved with your ideas, but assassinate with full vim and vigour committees that mercilessly kill creativity. Make your employees brand emissaries who share in your brand’s experience.
6.
Rather than insulate self-interests.
Selflessly reward talent Encourage individulas to become the next masters of their trade.
Use this opportunity of broad global change to do more than just pay people with money. Mentor your closest people to become worldclass leaders in their own rights
Learning and development proves you care. When the recession is finally finished people will remember what you did to them as well as for them.
In the mid-to longer term you will have a marketing team better placed to turn creative campaigns into convincing returns.
7.
Aspire to being more than a bargain -
basement brand: add value The recession turned too many retailers into paranoiacs slashing prices with unrestrained glee. Whilst products and services still need to be affordable, now, beyond cutting costs alone, most businesses want to reduce risks. Help them.
Whilst last moment sales keep competitors on their feet, consistent cost cutting affecting your bottom-line turns perceived premium brand services into discounted bland servants. Worst still, hasty price cuts today affect cost sensitivity tomorrow.
Your brand is truly magnificent. People deserve to enjoy it. Give them greater reasons to want to buy. For example, lower emissions, improved after-care, better design‌
Show that they needn’t scrap for second-rate bargains fought over by wild savages, rather select your brand as chosen by intelligent consumers.
8.
Pull it out of the hat faster
Get to market quicker and smarter by being keener and nimbler than your competitors.
Incorporate new technologies such as Tablets, to shorten purchase cylcle.
Use media such a video to demonstrate your products and services, supported by instant online payment systems which ensure that as soon as demand spurts, products can be in people’s hands.
“He who distributes fastest wins!”
9.
Surround yourself with experienced
sages People need work and great people want to work with you. You can now afford to work with them. Don’t compromise by settling for second best or calling in favours. Don’t lose your best talent through process-mapping your credibility away. Be kind. Show support. However, get rid of the rotting dead meat. You honestly cannot afford to keep on clutching to driftwood in a sea of uncertainty.
Recruit the very best. Can’t afford long-term commitment? Get freelancers who have to work for their Marks and Spencer TV dinner.
Speak to the best creative agencies… best project managers and so on. Surround yourself with people who have seen economiies boom and bust. A few grey hairs around a table add tone to the fresh roots straight out of college.
10.
Get back in the driving seat
Don’t become pre-occupied in pipe dreams. Get your hands back on the wheel of your destiny. Be honest. Think about how your efforts can actually improve people’s lives.
Implement high standards of integrity and ethics in all you do and say. You are no longer selling just a product or service – you are pioneering a cause for people to follow and believe in.
Drive hard and with determination. For example, secure media that aren’t even on the standard ‘menu’. Steer people by inspiring them with the prospect of personal development gains rather threatening them with the fear of loss.
According to a McKinsey study of the 1990/91 recession, the companies which increased their spend during a recession were the only ones whose profits rose substantially when the economy recovered. According to a Hillier analysis of 1,000 companies from PIMS (Profit Impact of Market Strategy) companies increasing spending in a recession recover three times faster than prior to a recession.