Tight Belt Marketing
We all have this reflex. When times are bad financially for ourselves or our business, we scale back. For ourselves, maybe we skip the movie theater or only go out to dinner once every two weeks. We mentally tighten our belts and plan to throw a party when things improve.
For our businesses, we tend to do the same. We cut back on advertising, on spendy client meals and entertainment, we slow down the promotions, we slash prices, and we even let go of an employee ... or many.
I had a professor of history in college that said this same tightening of the belt is what made the Great Depression even worse. Without any spending, nobody was making any money, no currency moved around, which made the whole problem seem that much worse than it was. I am in no way knocking on our parents and grandparents, if there were a Depression in the present day I’d probably be stuffing dollar bills into my mattress too.
That same mindset will kill our businesses. End them. Close the doors permanently. Finito.
No more client spiffs like a nice dinner at the Tapas bar or tickets to the big game? Your client suddenly feels like he isn’t a valued customer of yours anymore. He might start shopping to find someone who does appreciate him.
Scaling back on advertising? Always run a full page, then go to a quarter page? Suicide on 2 levels, because it tells the world you are not doing well, assuming that little ad will even be noticed, which is the second problem. Big deep discount sales? Sounds like you are going out of business. No more radio announcements? All those people used to hearing your little jingle in the car on the way home from work no longer have a reminder that your garden center exits, and wind up getting plants from a big box store when they only planned on getting a new tape measure. No monthly flyer in mailboxes? Again, no visual reminder of your existence.
People have very short memories.
We as consumers are subjected to so many advertising messages per day - the exact number varies from 285 to something ridiculously insane like 4 billion, depending upon the source of your information. Most of these images and messages are from large companies with mucho bucks, not from “little people” with 50 to 1,000 employees. With all those messages, if your voice is lost, the big boys will be happy to snap up the dollars you are missing.
Surely you have had this conversation with someone before: What was that place that had the great service again? Yeah, with that hilarious radio jingle that went dada, dada dee do...hahaha. What happened to them?
Hard as it is, the real solution in bad times is to spend MORE in advertising. I know, sounds crazy doesn’t it? The first time I heard that, while working as a lowly artist at a large newspaper, I thought it was just a greedy sales rep trying to squeeze more sales from a spent turnip. That, and the old “one ad run isn’t going to do it, you need at least 3 runs before you can decide if the ad is working” line. Well... turns out she was right.
I honestly think even if you kept your advertising dollars the same, you’d probably be ok because every other business out there will be cutting back and your information comes to the forefront more often. And, in bad times, many media outlets will cut you a deal, like an extra radio slot, or a discount on a larger ad just so they fill the book.
As a business owner, I know just how hard it is not to panic and cut back too - and I preach this stuff! But if you swallow hard, and dip into the business savings, you have a much better chance of survival in a tough time than if you simply cut back.
