Marketing in a Recession

Here are the facts:

1. Our economy is in recession.
2. Now is the perfect time to focus on increasing market share.
3. Someone in your company will want to cut the marketing budget.
4. You must, at all costs, preserve your marketing budget.

Think about it. If your competitors spend less to market their products than they currently are, and you spend the same (or slightly more), you’ll have a chance to increase your market share at a lower cost than in a good economy.

This is nothing new. Proctor & Gamble did it with Ivory Soap during the Great Depression. Their sponsorship of radio dramas not only lead to the coining of the term “soap opera,” it also landed them a boatload of money in a down economy.

The question is, do you have the nerve? Penn State Business Researcher Gary Lilien says that those companies that make their recession marketing efforts work are those who match their business savvy with the will to push harder. As BNET quotes Lilien,

“Companies that have been looking at marketing as an investment, and not an expense, and have been running their business through customer knowledge are the ones that are going to come out of this [recession] really, really well.”

John Quelch, Harvard Business School's Senior Associate Dean also lists researching customers and maintaining marketing spending as the two key components to marketing in a recession (the rest are on BusinessWeek.com). The winners often do what the crowd is not. Why do you think Warren Buffet is investing right now?

Of course spending a lot of money in a recession is risky. But you can mange that risk. You can manage risk by understanding your customers. You can manage risk by marketing smarter.

So marketers need a solution that reflects their company understands its customers. They need a solution that gives phenomenal ROI.

I’m partial to one-to-one cross-media marketing. Such campaigns usually include a direct mail piece, an email and a PURL (personal URL). Today’s technology lets you take customer data that you have on file and customize every printed and online communication with your customers. That means you can send different offers to different prospects based on their demographics, buying habits, place in the sales cycle and place in the customer life-cycle.

Not only does this approach show your customers you know them, it costs a fraction of TV ads and, on average, provides better return-on-investment. As one CEO once told me, “One-to-one marketing is like regular marketing on steroids.”

So think about it. See yourself dominating the market. And if you want to know more about one-to-one, email me.