On the Harvard Business School Blog Professor John Quelch provides the following tips for Marketing during tough times (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5878.html):

1. Research the customer. Instead of cutting the market research budget, you need to know more than ever how consumers are redefining value and responding to the recession. Price elasticity curves are changing. Consumers take more time searching for durable goods and negotiate harder at the point of sale. They are more willing to postpone purchases, trade down, or buy less. Must-have features of yesterday are today’s can-live-withouts. Trusted brands are especially valued and they can still launch new products successfully, but interest in new brands and new categories fades. Conspicuous consumption becomes less prevalent.

2. Focus on family values. When economic hard times loom, we tend to retreat to our village. Look for cozy hearth-and-home family scenes in advertising to replace images of extreme sports, adventure, and rugged individualism. Zany humor and appeals on the basis of fear are out. Greeting card sales, telephone use, and discretionary spending on home furnishings and home entertainment will hold up well, as uncertainty prompts us to stay at home but also stay connected with family and friends.

3. Maintain marketing spending. This is not the time to cut 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. Uncertain consumers need the reassurance of known brands, and more consumers at home watching television can deliver higher than expected audiences at lower cost-per-thousand impressions. Brands with deep pockets may be able to negotiate favorable advertising rates and lock them in for several years. If you have to cut marketing spending, try to maintain the frequency of advertisements by shifting from 30-second to 15-second advertisements, substituting radio for television advertising, or increasing the use of direct marketing, which gives more immediate sales impact.

4. Adjust product portfolios. Marketers must reforecast demand for each item in their product lines as consumers trade down to models that stress good value, such as cars with fewer options. Tough times favor multi-purpose goods over specialized products, and weaker items in product lines should be pruned. In grocery-products categories, good-quality own-brands gain at the expense of national brands. Industrial customers prefer to see products and services unbundled and priced separately. Gimmicks are out; reliability, durability, safety, and performance are in. New products, especially those that address the new consumer reality and thereby put pressure on competitors, should still be introduced, but advertising should stress superior price performance, not corporate image.

5. Support distributors. In uncertain times, no one wants to tie up working capital in excess inventories. Early-buy allowances, extended financing, and generous return policies motivate distributors to stock your full product line. This is particularly true with unproven new products. Be careful about expanding distribution to lower-priced channels; doing so can jeopardize existing relationships and your brand image. However, now may be the time to drop your weaker distributors and upgrade your sales force by recruiting those sacked by other companies.

6. Adjust pricing tactics. Customers will be shopping around for the best deals. You do not necessarily have to cut list prices, but you may need to offer more temporary price promotions, reduce thresholds for quantity discounts, extend credit to long-standing customers, and price smaller pack sizes more aggressively. In tough times, price cuts attract more consumer support than promotions such as sweepstakes and mail-in offers.

7. Stress market share. In all but a few technology categories where growth prospects are strong, companies are in a battle for market share and, in some cases, survival. Knowing your cost structure can ensure that any cuts or consolidation initiatives will save the most money with minimum customer impact. Companies such as Wal-Mart and Southwest Airlines, with strong positions and the most productive cost structures in their industries, can expect to gain market share. Other companies with healthy balance sheets can do so by acquiring weak competitors.

8. Emphasize core values. Although most companies are making employees redundant, chief executives can cement the loyalty of those who remain by assuring employees that the company has survived difficult times before, maintaining quality rather than cutting corners, and servicing existing customers rather than trying to be all things to all people. CEOs must spend more time with customers and employees. Economic recession can elevate the importance of the finance director’s balance sheet over the marketing manager’s income statement. Managing working capital can easily dominate managing customer relationships. CEOs must counter this. Successful companies do not abandon their marketing strategies in a recession; they adapt them.

Mar 22, 2010 1:39 PM, By Andrea Hribar–Chiefmarketer.com

Super Bowl 2010 is over and as the play-by-plays of the actual game continue in the media, so does the debate over the best (and worst) Super Bowl commercials. It’s amazing, but not really surprising, the response these million-dollar ads get every year. The ads are meant to evoke at least a response…if not a purchase of some kind. If the ads are not offensive to at least one group, we might wonder what went wrong for these companies and the ad agencies who produce the creative for them. Humor is the safest way to score an advertising touch down, and there’s plenty of that. But to really strike a chord, sometimes advertisements have to take a point of view, it may not be shared by eveyone, but it gets attention, makes us think, and raises a topic for conversation. In our minds, that’s the real value of this type of ’show piece’ advertising: fulfilling the need for communicating with many individuals representing of all sides of a story or issue.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/02/hunters-and-farmers.html

Which one are you? Read Seth Godin’s post on the difference between these two groups anf find out!

There are many problems in the world. Some of them minor and temporary, like headaches, and some of them that seem almost impossible to resolve, such as global warming. Fortunately, there are usually multiple ideas available to help solve a single problem, although they may not necessarily be implemented. This theory holds true when we talk about marketing products and services.

To be successful, a product or service needs to solve a problem that is experienced by a large enough group of people (i.e. the target audience) to make it worthwhile (profitable) to develop it and sell it. If this is achieved by one organization, it is almost certain that competitors will try to gain some market share. Then it becomes a case of which solution is better, as determined by the customer base. May the best solution win.

By now many of us have heard about Domino Pizza’s new marketing campaign and maybe seen the TV ads or heard the radio spots. We must admit, the website featuring the Pizza Turnaround Documentary is pretty cute. And the strategy is a bold one–as bold as their new pizza sauce? The votes aren’t in yet. It will be interesting to see if this is enough to bring the pizza delivery market back to Dominos again. So check it out at http://www.pizzaturnaround.com/ and let us know what you think.

A final note…from our perspective this type of ‘consumer transparency’ campaign is cool, but the questions that come to our minds is: why did it take Dominos so long to improve (that’s subjective) their product. And secondly, how did the pricing strategy play into the equation?

It’s easy to get disheartened when everything you do to persuade people to buy your product or service seems futile. However, there is a relatively easy fix when it comes to real or perceived lack of consumer motivation. Objectively examine what the payoff is that your product or service provides.

It’s simple, but not easy. If you can’t look at your own business/products/services objectively, a well-developed formal or informal customer or prospect survey can help you identify areas where you fall short.

The payoff your product or service provides doesn’t have to be fancy, but it does need to be relevant to your target audience. For example, the Tylenol brand of acetaminophen competes in a category full of generic and brand-name products, to differentiate beyond the basic payoff of pain relief, Tylenol promotes its effective yet stomach sensitive formula, plus the fact that it won’t interact with high blood pressure medication. These are important payoffs to older adults who are looking for a way to deal with the aches and pains associated with aging.

Once you identify the primary payoff for your customers, make sure you communicate it clearly, concisely, and consistently in your marketing and promotions.

‘Tis the season to get your final budgets together before welcoming the new year, and although the focus is inevitably going to be on numbers, the question really is not how many dollars–but what is the return on those dollars. That’s where measurability has to be part of your marketing budget planning. Not just ‘how much will we allocate to which media’, but ‘for $X spent we expect $X multipled by 1.7 in increased revenue.’ The trick is to find data to support these kind of statements. That’s why tracking and evaluating your marketing efforts throughout the year (not just at crunch time) is so important.

Make having a continual Cost vs. Benefit analysis of your marketing efforts a resolution for 2010!

Below is a link to Today’s Spotlight Video on YouTube, a perfect example of how HP is utilizing not only video, but celebrity partnership to promote its brand:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsjsfvjhHXI&feature=youtube_gdata

Food for thought~