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Brand Forensics' marketing lessons from the recession
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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.