How to Sell in a Recession

Tuesday, October 9, 2001

http://www.jian.com

Today's piece comes from a treasured correspondent from
across the pond--James Souttar, principal of Just Proportion, a design communications firm in the UK. He brings us ten keys to successful communication during a recession.

1. Cut the costs, not the communication.

The first pressure in a recessionary climate is to cut costs. But organizations must to continue to communicate in order to survive. Consequently, it's a false economy to look for cost savings by cutting back the communication you have with your stakeholders. Indeed, you may need to increase your contact with them. Look instead at ways to make the communication cheaper, rather than have less of it. Lower production values don't necessarily mean degraded communication--love letters don't need full color printing. Further, each contact you make with stakeholders can be used for multiple purposes: for instance, monthly statements can carry news or marketing messages presently conveyed in other materials addressed to the same people. Economy can be a brand virtue, too-- consciously avoiding waste and shifting to more appropriate
technologies and materials is an opportunity to play the
environmentally-sensitive card.

2. Sell the steak, not the sizzle.


In an expanding market the conventional wisdom is to look for ways to add value to your proposition by attaching intangibles.
Developments in branding over the last ten years illustrate
just this--but in the heady years of the New Economy, they
sometimes went so far that the brand became more important
than the product or service offering. In a recession, intangibles
are seen as an unnecessary luxury. People who are feeling the
pinch need to believe that they want the product, not the brand.
Key brand attributes will thus be practical, down-to-earth,
product-and-service qualities like value for money, reliability,
versatility, and effectiveness. The winners will be those who
can make the best case for the value of their steaks, not the
sexiness of the sizzle.

3. Accentuate the positive

When people are jittery, fearful, and pessimistic, a positive
message delivered with confidence and energy can become a
beacon of hope. Find things about your organization, products,
and service delivery that people honestly feel positive about,
and project them energetically. Almost inevitably, these won't
be the abstract values that senior management deliberate over,
but tangible attributes. Ask your stakeholders where your real
value lies--they know the basis for their relationship with
our organization better than you do. You'll usually find that
little tangible things often make a bigger difference than
grand, abstract concepts.

4. Enrich the communication

The people who read your communications need to feel they are
getting something to justify their efforts. Too often corporate
communications show the organization talking to itself, or
are obvious first steps in an 'action chain', rather than being
enriching experiences in their own right. In a boom, this doesn't
really matter. In a recession you have to work much, much harder.
You need to ask yourself why anyone would want to read what
you've written: what will they get for their time and attention?
Is there anything in your message that will make them feel better
disposed towards you, even if they don't take the next step in your action chain? People get the most out relevant, entertaining, informative material--that also has some substance. Dumbing down your material, and giving it bland, generic treatments, makes it unrewarding.

5. Take people with you

People are growing to resent organizations--often with good
reason. Despite the customer-facing rhetoric of the '90s, many organizations make little secret of the fact that they exist to create wealth for their shareholders. This can leave customers (and others) feeling they are being farmed, rather than meaningfully engaged. Organizations that continue to behave in this way will increasingly find themselves in exposed positions as their customers, staff, and partners ask why they should help enrich someone else.
At the same time, growing anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements will fuel feelings of dissent by keeping such issues as exploitation on the social agenda. The organizations that will fare best will be the ones that people actively want to root for. And nobody roots for groups that don't communicate warmly, openly, and, most of all, honestly.

6. Authenticity, authenticity, authenticity

Marketing has become the focus of increasing cynicism and
suspicion.As messages about products and services are spun
with more and more sophistication, they seem less and less
authentic. Even such developments as personalization--which
were supposed to deliver one-to-one relationships--have failed to connect with individuals in a meaningful manner because marketers have used the technology to find characteristics they can exploit, rather than to find out how they can improve their offering. Backlash is inevitable, and will undoubtedly be exacerbated in the forthcoming recession. Already there is evidence that for one highly significant group--the so-called new simpletons--the more a product or service is spun, the less attractive it becomes (as is clearly illustrated in the fate of politicians across the spectrum). As people downshift their lifestyles to meet constrained purses, they will find increasing satisfaction with less polished-and-packaged products, ironically rediscovering the authenticity that more overly branded offers have lost.

7. Make it easy for people to buy

In competing ever more ingeniously for market share, marketers tend to forget that their core markets consist of people who actually want to buy what they have to offer. In a boom, much more attention is given to finding ways to sell to people who don't know they want the product, or don't want it very much, rather than to people who have already identified a need. Paradoxically,
the latter group can often find it hard to buy what they want because the products, propositions, and processes are not designed with them in mind. Over the next few years the organizations
who thrive will be those who tailor their offerings to their core
markets--who listen to what people really want, and make it
easy for them to get it. That core, incidentally, has to include
everyone who might want your products and services, not just
prime customers cherry-picked from the most desirable segments.

8. Manage to relate - don't manage the relationship.

As a recent report in Marketing reveals, CRM (Customer
Relationship Management) has failed to deliver perceptible
benefits to the organizations who were its most enthusiastic
proponents. In the process, it has also come to be hated by
consumers, who don't want to be managed and aren't prepared
to accept a no from someone who is not empowered to give
them a yes. Whilst call centers bombard 'decision makers' with calls, it can be almost impossible for inbound callers to find
decision makers within the organization who can help them.
And customers whose metrics don't show them to be worthwhile
(which is all of us, in some contexts) often have excruciating
experiences with call centers when CRM systems identify them
as timewasters. As markets become tougher, decision makers
have to become accessible again. In a buyer's market, The people
who deal with customers need the authority and autonomy to
serve them properly--or nobody will bother with them.

9. Forget the Internet.

It's all over bar the shouting. It's now clear that the Internet--particularly e-business and the consumer web--has signally failed to live up to expectations, despite incredible levels of investment. The reasons for this are straightforward. The web experience continues to be frustratingly slow for most users, and both the novelty and patience have now run out. With the exception of certain useful applications (which
will undoubtedly remain), the material one finds on the web is still a poor substitute for printed material in content, presentation, and usability. Worse, it rarely lives up to the possibilities of the medium for freshness or interactivity. Much worse, the web has
also become another way to put up barriers between organizations
and their audiences. E-business, for instance, became a way of
making the customer do the grunt work of order processing with
none of the pleasure, interaction, or engagement of shopping and all
of the disadvantages of ordering by mail. Now that the bubble has
burst, expenditure on web development will be harder to justify,
and more closely related to real benefits. Consequently, the use of
the web will be more tactical, based on an understanding of the
ways it can complement other communications to sustain long-term
relationships with audiences, and playing to its proven strengths.

10. Understand the basis of human communication

Communication has become a technical activity--and often
feels like it. But in fact everything we describe as communication in the corporate context is really just talk. Given the desire to build long-term, sustainable relationships, it should aspire to be an ongoing conversation rather than a series of one-sided speeches. Recognizing that conversation, rather than rhetoric,
is the ideal model for corporate communication is the key to
communicating effectively at a time when those relationships
are under threat. We need to understand what human beings look for in communication: in all our social contexts, we seek, as we have always sought, attention, safety, and positive regard. These priorities remain despite the fact that we are engaging with an organization rather than each other; information per se is far less important than interaction. Corporate communication is going to have to become much more human, and more humane,
if it is to re-engage its most critical audiences in the new era.

Thank you, James. Now, let's go sell some steak out there,
--

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