Recession Marketing Planning

To weather a recession, the general consensus is that a business must stimulate consumer demand by redefining and zeroing in on their repeat purchasers and customer base. They may need to narrow their product lines, offer cheaper products, give bulk purchase discounts, lower prices across the board, increase promotional coupons and offer products directly to consumers. In addition to these general ideas, there are many other marketing planning initiatives you can undertake to keep the tide of profit rolling in.

“If firms blatantly go out and increase their spending on marketing, a lot of them are going to fail,” warns Dr. Gary Lilien, author of a Penn State study about recession business marketing planning. He says successful firms need three characteristics in order to succeed during an economic downturn. First, he says, “You need a marketing emphasis. You can’t all of the sudden start focusing on marketing… but if you know how to do it, if you had a marketing emphasis before, that’s one characteristic.” He adds that companies also need to have the guts to increase marketing. “You need the will to do it, which is characterized in our research by an entrepreneurial culture, a willingness to say, ‘Things are getting bad, should we push harder?’ Firms with entrepreneurial culture are used to doing that,” says Dr. Lilien. Lastly, you need the capital. “The technical term is slack resources, in other words, having the budget to do it. Even if you have the first two, a marketing emphasis and an entrepreneurial culture, it’s risky. Make sure you’ve got the resources to do it,” he said. “The firms that had all three characteristics did very well in a recession. But firms that are missing any one of them, they’re in trouble. Frankly, most firms in our analysis cut their [marketing] budget in a recession.”

Media planning is also an important part of recession marketing. Far too often, business owners hastily throw together a marketing planning budget based on “what others are doing” or based on “previous years,” without really analyzing what is or isn’t working. For a small price, business owners can hire Search Engine Optimization experts who can take a good look at the company homepage to see which areas are driving away potential sales; they can also see where these potential sales are going once they leave the page and identify what sort of keywords their target market is searching on the web. Email providers can give you valuable statistics on your email marketing efforts as well. Likewise, media planners can also help you put together customized market plans that allocate your funds to the most effective strategies for your products, your target market and your geographic location.

As Henry Ford once said, “A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time.” Indeed, it is futile to give up on marketing planning so soon. During a recession, allocate some of your big budget funds — like street promotions, billboard ads, magazine spreads and radio ads — to digital avenues like email, marketing newsletters, web articles, blogs, social networks and pay-per-click advertising. “It is well documented that brands that increase advertising during a recession, when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and return on investment at lower cost than during good economic times,” adds John Quelch, a professor at Harvard Business School.

Rene Lacape is a well trained insurance broker. He has been handling many kinds of insurances for the past many years. He still does well in his chosen field and is sure to help more people who will need his expert advice. Contact him now.