Recession Marketing: There’s some good news too!
I have a bad habbit of finding a higher purpose in places where it doesn’t exist. This tends to creep people out when it feels inappropriate. I’m feeling that way again right now as I contemplate the latest financial news, and the current dark days of the U.S. dollar.
What’s nice about what is going on right now, for me, is that it doesn’t involve Internet spending this time. The bubble that burst in 2000 caused an avelance of failing businesses and unemployed database programmers. The Internet isn’t the problem this time. (In fact, the Internet may save the day for many. Because you don’t need gasoline to ship e-cards or send e-mails.)
What we have today is, admittedly, an economic challenge, but at least we have the ability to use the Internet to maintain our marketing campaigns. That wasn’t the case in 2000. Few Internet companies knew what they were doing, even the ones selling ad space. There was no Google Adwords. Search marketing was almost a side interest.
Now we have all manner of ways to continue to court customers - electronicly and inexpensively. (I mean, you know - relative to a billboard or radio ad.) And we should definitely be using them, even now as the number of leads seems to get slimmer.
Times like this take me back to what my Father - who was a Marketing VP at Motorola at the time - told me about the recession of the early 80s. In particular, he told me how Japanese businesses handled that recession: They continued their marketing campaigns, knowing that eventually the bad times would end and we would go back to the regular, steady upward trend. By maintaining their campaigns, companies like Matsushita and Sony didn’t lose market share, even though if it wasn’t a time where they were making a great deal of money. When things got better, these companies were immediately making back money from the consumers who returned to them. Other companies that didn’t have that foresight, the ones that battened down their hatches, halted their campaigns, and waiting for things to get better to start up again, were then forced to play catch-up in getting back their customers. When things started getting better, they were in no position to take advantage of it. By the time their efforts were put in place, the market had already shifted towards companies that were ready from the start.
The point here is, thanks to how (again, relatively,) inexpensive it is to continue to market your company and brand, this recession has a silver lining: This is the least expensive time to protect your market share. Even if times are bad, they always get better, and now we have the ability to make sure we’re in a position to come back just as strong when that time comes.
