Recession marketing. No such thing?
Protect market share. Maintain margins. Demonstrate value. Cut costs. Increase ROI. Get closer to customers. Build relationships. Innovate. Drive the brand. Boost visibility. Neutralise competitors. Refresh the message. Take cover!
Around July 2008, I started getting mails about how to protect your business in hard times. About how such-and-such could demonstrate how to do all or some of the things listed above. Check the web and you’ll find stacks of stuff on how marketing should respond to a recession – the exact phrase ‘recession marketing’ just got 59,600 results on Google.
With one obvious exception, doesn’t the list above include the things marketing should be doing all the time? How come there is such a bright spotlight on them when times change?
Contribute to your customers’ success
Referring to the challenges faced by SA companies, a prominent local economist, FNB’s Cees Bruggemans, had this to say in July 08 about opportunities in a recession:
Information technology, logistics and other high-technology suppliers may find exceptional opportunities in the current environment if it assists clients to reconfigure their businesses, reducing operational costs.
If a company’s products and services can reduce customers’ operating costs, do they become more attractive in a recession? If so, were they somehow less attractive pre-recession? ‘Business is so good all round that our customers don’t think about their operating costs.’
Most likely, cost-reduction benefits were being overlooked or insufficiently emphasised. At the same time, they were probably not being delivered to the right audiences within the market.
Get back to basics. Huh?
A lot of talk about ‘recession marketing’ centres around getting back to basics. In essence, this is an admission that B2B marketing has lost its way and has not been performing as an effective business tool. This is probably true: the basics are being consistently ignored.
Perhaps it’s not so much about getting back to the basics as understanding what they are: cultivating consistent customers and preventing price pressure. CCC and PPP should be driving the marketing function when the good times roll and when they don’t.
The right message to the right people
Look and listen. Look at what is happening in the market – your market – and listen to what it’s saying. What challenges are customers facing and how do your products and services address them?
Demonstrating the performance of products and services in the context of current challenges is one of B2B marketing’s key responsibilities. Marketers should always be keenly aware of the contribution their company makes to each customer’s continued success. It’s an ongoing process that is in tune with the constantly changing B2B environment.
Sometimes the environment is relatively stable and the pace of change is moderate and comfortable. Sometimes the pace and scale of change is far greater.
This recession has certainly accelerated changes in B2B markets. But it has also polarised the changes in the sense that there is now greater uniformity in the nature of the challenges facing B2B companies.
As markets contract across the board, more and more companies are looking for the same outcomes.
Times might have changed, but marketing’s responsibility to communicate the right message to the right people remains constant.
It’s essential to understand what customers are buying, how it helps them and who is buying.
What-How-Who – marketing’s focus on buying – should be determining activities in the first place - in order to deliver the right messages to the right people.
More on the fundamentals of B2B marketing:
The Man in the Chair – well worth watching on YouTube Getting real in B2B – what do you represent?
Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line
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