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November 2008

5 marketing strategy tips for the new year

Kevin Clancy and Peter Krieg offer marketing strategy do's and don't's to protect your brand and build your bottom line.

Waltham, MA (PRWEB) November 24, 2008 --While marketers are taking it on the chin with spending cutbacks by their bosses and their buyers, there are some actionable marketing strategy tips to empower your brand for the new year.

If there's one thing that's not in short supply these days at least, it's advice for marketers about what to do to grow as the economy tanks. But according to Kevin Clancy and Peter Krieg of Copernicus, a research-driven marketing consulting firm, much of the conventional marketing strategy advice out there, such as spend more on marketing and innovate like crazy, does not reflect business reality at most companies.

Walking in the shoes of your consumers is the key to keeping products moving during a recession. When the buyers of your products and services are really struggling, your marketing efforts need to have pinpoint accuracy in terms of who you are talking to, what you offer, and when to get them to pledge patronage and loyalty to your brand and not somebody else's.  

 Now and for the new year, marketers can successfully use the pressure they are under to help the company make their numbers and channel their nervous energy not into one-off, quick and dirty marketing tactics, but into putting together a well-thought out marketing strategy to drive sales, profits, and growth.  

1. Maybe Do/Maybe Don't: Increase Your Marketing Spending
Whether or not you see any bottom-line benefit in the short- or long-run depends on a whole lot more that the size of the increase to your budget. No matter the condition of the economy, the buyer target, the brand's positioning, the ad copy, the ad executions, the media vehicles are more important than the budget in driving revenues. In one Copernicus analysis, the firm discovered that Three Sigma targeting/positioning/copy/ad execution/media vehicles yield much greater effects on market share and brand equity than doubling the budget. The message here: Get all the elements of your marketing strategy lined up before considering this bold move.

2. Don't: Enter Into the More-for-Your-Money Race
Research from Copernicus shows that price is the primary consideration for only 15 to 35 percent of buyers in

most product and service categories. Even during a recession. Price may become a more important consideration as household and corporate budgets get tighter, but it is not necessarily--or even customarily--the most important consideration. What's more, price cuts can cause serious problems if they reset buyer expectations about prices or go against a brand's image. The halls of marketing history are littered with brands that dropped their pants to make a sale in a recession only to find they couldn't pull them back up again once it was over.

3. Don't: Get Ugly With Your Advertising
Going negative with your advertising and poking holes in competitors' products doesn't offer much in the way of a defensible positioning--it's likely quite easy for your competitor to come right back and do the same. The back and forth starts and pretty soon buyers have no idea who the ads are for, never mind why they should buy either brand. If your advertising raises more questions than it answers, you're going to get tuned out.

4. Do: Walk Two Miles in Your Customers' Shoes
"Walking in the shoes of your consumers is the key to keeping products moving during a recession," the CMO of Kraft Foods Mary Beth West told an audience of fellow marketers. "And I am talking about walking not just a mile, but two miles." In other words, marketers should NOT guess at what will or won't work to motivate buyers during a recession, and instead go beyond the customer information basics that everyone in the category likely has. The brands that will win this footrace are the ones that have the deeper knowledge of the twists and turns of the course.

5. Do: Find the Blue Sky/White Space/Big Hairy Opportunity
If ever there was a time when people are aware of their problems, pains, areas of dissatisfaction and willing to talk about them, it's now! Figure out what people are missing in the category in general and determine if you can deliver it to them profitably. In your advertising, explain how and why your brand is uniquely qualified to solve their very real problem. Give people a reason to listen and you will break through--now in tough times and, very importantly, when happy days are here again.

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