How wonderful! The recession is over! President Obama said so. I’m happy for my friends and neighbours who need the work and for college students who should be worried about STDs and not the job market. But I admit I’m a little sad to see it go.
Now that good times are back, with little apparently learned, we are going to be filling our vacancies, eating lunch out, attending conferences in lovely places and glaring the Hand-Wringers back to the corner.
I’m sad because marketers are inherently lazy and when times are good we fling money in the general direction of our agencies and head out to the gym, secure in the knowledge that our asses are covered and if the campaign tanks, the numbers will probably still be good.
When things are ugly, however, marketers rise to the occasion. We become assiduous about planning and we make an effort to measure things – credit must be offered to the Hand-Wringers here since they both compel and enable us to do this stuff.
But more than just cleaning up our acts, we start to try stuff. Hail Mary marketing rules the day in tough times. It’s about long-shots and risks – not stupid ones that cost a lot; calculated strategic risks. We let weird fringe stuff like blogging, social media, SEO and content come to the party because it’s cheap and we can do it ourselves, and in so doing, we make it mainstream and change the game a little more.
Recessions also get us to think for a change. Instead of stumbling from campaign to product launch and back again, we think about things like value and value propositions, brand equity, product alignment, compensation models, better reporting, improved processes and customer retention.
Ever opportunists, we use the recessionary retreat in prices to renegotiate with trusted suppliers and kick the not-so-good ones to the curb. We don’t let our agencies make us pay to fill their trophy cases; we make them tie billing (theirs) to results (ours). We lock-in long-term contracts for media, sponsorship, research, exhibit space and anything else we can think of.
We capitalize on the sudden surplus of talent by picking off the best people as they are cut free by our competitors or by monopolizing the top freelancers and paying more attention to our own top performers. We find innovative, motivated vendors to replace the complacent and lazy ones.
In many companies, the first place our Corporate Overlords go in search of higher tithes or fresh cannon fodder is the marketing department. Recessions remind us to stand up for ourselves and learn to articulate the value we bring to the company. They force us to challenge the Weenuses in other departments like Productivity Prevention (aka IT) to do better and be nicer.
We get tough with our colleagues in sales too. No more excuses or internecine sniping. Recessions are the time to sit down with sales and figure out how they can feed their families and nurture their customer relationships. A smart person (whose name I completely forget) recently studied medical trauma teams to understand why, when hospital politics and hierarchies are often brutal, these teams work so effectively without throwing things at each other. The answer (in hindsight stunningly obvious) is a shared goal. If a recession does nothing more than help us find a common goal and give us the courage to fling the ball as hard as we can toward it, then it is indeed a greater gift than we realize.
Related Posts
Ten Things to Do in a Recession
Ten More Things to Do in a Recession
BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
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Eva Ivanov says
internecine? Please translate. Loved the weeuses, and finally a proper name for the IT department. OMG. . great stuff Liz.
E
bizmarketer says
That’s one of my favourite words. It has to do with bloody infighting among members of a single group. Kind of like church choirs when it’s time for new robes.