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Ten recession marketing tips

Now is the perfect time to do real marketing: targeting, segmenting, adding value at little cost. It's very tempting to reduce the marketing budget. This would be a mistake; just spend it much more wisely.

Marketing is the key to your long-term future; remember this recession will end and you want to be ready. You must keep your marketing investment rolling. Here's how.

1. Start marketing again

Do you remember Kotler? Did you ever study him on your MBA or read about him in an in-flight magazine? Kotler came up with the '4Ps', an absolute bedrock of all marketing principles. Although they have been repackaged many times (even by Kotler himself ), the basics remain sound. Success in business is about the right combination of:

P roduct, sold through the right
P lace (channel), at the right
P rice with appropriate
P romotion.

Now, how simple is that? What this recession does is get us to go back to the core of our marketing thinking. And to do that you need to run an off-site meeting.

2. Run an off-site meeting?

You need to go off site because you have been so busy the last few years in a pleasantly heady economy that you have lost sight of the core of your business. If you stay in the office, the phone will ring and Andy from despatch will always need a signature. So you are going to get off site. But keep it cheap. Someone's kitchen will do fine. No phones or email. You need a few flip-charts, some masking tape and pens. Here are the three questions you are going to ask at that off-site meeting:

What business are we in now?
What business do we need to be in, in three years' time?
How can we close the gap?

For each of the time periods you will consider each of the 4Ps.

3. Product

Get clear on what you currently offer, whether it's a solid product (a desk, a book, a meal) or a service (car valeting or dry-cleaning) or a mixture of both. Get the flip-charts stuck up on the wall and identify current SWOTs:

S trengths (we have feature X; nobody else does).
W eaknesses (we do not offer 24-7 support and that is increasingly required).
O pportunities (in the recession we are leaner than most; we can probably grow at a greater rate than our competitors).
T hreats (we are only UK based, many of our clients need us to have European offices).

Now identify some actions to take you to where you want to be in three years' time, knowing that at least nine months of that will be recession. Good work: you are managing the recession but also using it as a stepping stone to greater things.

4. Price

Be provocative here: where did your current pricing policy come from? Is it history ('It's always been like this')? Cost plus some margin? The industry you are in? Copying the competition? It almost doesn't matter what the rationale is, as long as there is one. Because once you know it you can begin to experiment more scientifically, for instance by choosing some premium priced products to boost margin with little loss of share.

5. Place

You must have a channel to your customers. You might sell direct, via a re-seller or both. Increasingly you have the internet too. Once again be provocative. How did the current channel structure originate? History? Market norms? Could you be radical and sell just through the internet, suddenly offer a highly personalised service or both?

6. Promotion

This is classic marketing for the man in the street - advertising and PR. The key here is the increasing fragmentation of the market and the opportunity for more digital services such as online marketing; many of these are more exciting in that they give you more accountability for your spend.

7. The strategic plan

Get one of the team to write this up. This is your analysis of where you are right now and where you want to be in three years' time. Set dates for your next strategic off-site meeting in twelve months' time. Now set quarterly dates for the tactical reviews which are your route to closing the gap.

8. The tactical plans

This plan needs to detail how you get from now to your desired future. It will have actions, milestones and, most importantly, owners, and it gets reviewed every quarter. In the meantime the owners walk away with daily and weekly task lists.

9. Marketing isn't (just).

... mailshots, web sites, blogging, PR, cool clothes, using wifi in coffee bars, jargon, value chains, core competencies, Tom Peters, Saatchi & Saatchi, large lunch budgets and Moleskine notebooks.

10. Marketing is...

... thinking, understanding, basics done really well, accountable budget spend, being different.


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