Marketing in a recession – you can’t afford not to

“You can’t ignore marketing’ when you are coming out of a recession.”

While, as a marketing agency owner, I am somewhat biased when I hear statements that promote active marketing campaigns, I need to stress that it wasn’t me who made the statement. It was actually one of the delegates that I met at a recent Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce event.

We had just sat through a presentation from the Bank of England, which was surprisingly entertaining – considering the subject matter and the recessionary oriented topic. But the speaker made the stats and trend analysis come to life.

It was after this that my newfound colleague (who does not work in marketing) stated the text-book argument, “Surely the best way for any company to get out of the recession ahead of its competitors is to market their way out?”

She’s right, but being right and actually doing it, are, as we all know, not always the same thing.

But it did remind me that I had now run a marketing consultancy agency through three recessions ; first in the late ’80s (just 2 months after we started the consultancy), then in the ’90s and now again in 2009. And in all three I can remember easily the number of companies that took the step of actively marketing their way out of the recession. I can remember them easily because they were the ones shortly after the recession ended that were smiling like Cheshire cats. They were very pleased with themselves and were reaping the benefits of their activities. Nice memories. 

But of course it wasn’t easy to do.

Text book marketing is a wonderful thing, mainly because there is no emotion involved. Look at facts and figures and yes it all makes sense. Add in a spoonful of people and that odd thing called a personality and it all goes haywire. But, the text books are normally right because they, themselves, have been produced without emotion. Commonly by very clever people that produce analysis and statistics to define what works, what doesn’t and what trends are created in every situation.

But the one thing that is common within marketing out of a recession is that the people that really succeed tend to be the same people that succeed in business. Purely (in my humble opinion) because they are: Entrepreneurs; Mavericks; Gamblers. They wouldn’t be running a business or responsible for a major piece of a business if they didn’t have that risk taking mentality. Those people that sit back and play it safe tend not to make many mistakes. The maverick personality works on the basis that if you don’t try it then it won’t ever happen.

And that is just the mentality that you need when it looks like everything around you is collapsing in a heap. As I write this, I can look back on last week and how Dubai added to the recessionary pressures, how RBS are playing silly wotsits  and talking about massive bonuses and how the government is cutting back it’s spenindg budgets. Faced with another dose of bad news it is easy to shut up shop or bury your head. But, during the same time I was able to see that new clients are coming on board because they want to ‘do amrketing’ to get as many people into their sales pipeline as they can ready for the new year. Many of our existing clients are beefing up their marketing because they feel they can’t sit back. All good news if you are sitting where I am.

So that led me to thinking. Is it just because we are in marketing that we are seeing this. Or, as I think is more likely, are we just surrounded by people (clients) that have the same mind set as us ‘Just Do It’? The reason I think it’s the latter is because marketing is a people business and anyone who has endured the marketing pitch situations will know that the right campaign, for the right company, at the right time and at the right price, doesn’t always win if the agency presentation team and the prospect just don’t hit it off. People matter.

So the moral? Within reason, Just Do It and do it hard and fast, mistakes and all, because if you just sit there ‘not doing anything’ it will come and bite you in the butt when you least expect it.