Recession Marketing

What is Recession Marketing?  

Forbes has an informative article written about this..speaking about “Recessions offer what may be unprecedented opportunities to market in and environment of relatively less noise, as others cut back.”  They also warned that ad agencies would pressure clients to increase their budgets in the face of a downturn.  Basically speaking, if clients don’t spend, agencies don’t have business.  It’s definitely a good read…giving you some great pointers on where to increase and where to decrease.  

Forrester’s Research, talks about:

Three important steps to Recession Marketing.

1. What consumers want from brands
2. Prioritizing your marketing spend
3. Engaging today’s consumer online and offline

Peer opinions carry considerable weight, examples are as follows:

• Valued opinion of a friend who has used product.
• Reviews-consumer reviews are highly valued on whether to buy or use service. Many sites offer this consumer review/poll.
• Online reviews by editors of a content site.  Gives a footing to online sales.

Consumers are showing they want more control…by not trusting popup ads, rather trusting emails they have signed up for.  If you’ve been using those pesky popups…now is a good time to get rid of them!  Other trusted agenda’s are Brand Web sites, In-store ads, Consumer opinions posted online.  

With personal optimism declining, recession has been moving people toward comfort and connection showing that consumers are shopping less and researching more.  With the consumer expecting to have less to spend, marketers also have less to spend, meaning brand loyalty has become more important than ever.  Marketers must be able to provide comfort and reassurance while doing more to meet the consumers’ unique needs.

Digital marketing is seeing a lot more increase than offline marketing.  Places like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Web Site development and Blogs have increased rapidly while the high cost traditional methods of marketing such as radio and television have dwindled down to a crawl.

“Given your decreased budget, how is your spending affected in each of the following areas?”

Base: 45 marketing leadership CMOs who have had their 2009 marketing budget reduced

Lisa Bradner a Principle Analyst at Forrester Research showed statistics representing that 72% of consumers say prior experience drives their brand loyalty, along with 58% of online adults say they trust online reviews more than any other medium except emails from friends.  Those are pretty big numbers.  She also found that in a recession many marketers are leaning toward digital as opposed to traditional.

With budgets being tighter than ever, it has driven the need for tough choices and prioritization.  On that note…Smart marketers will take that leap not only to acquire new customers/clients, but to also enhance the brand experience with the old ones as well.