When you’re under siege – a place many resellers find themselves in this off-the-cliff economy – you’ll find advice at every turn about what you should and should not do with your marketing dollars, what works and doesn’t work in recessionary times, and more. Much of it is very good and useful, to be sure (for example, check out the “Additional Resources” at the end of this article). An ardent and persistent plea is to not cut your marketing budget, a plea that sounds to some like functional myopia from those who know nothing about other business expense realities. The fact is, under revenue pressure, the marketing budget often must take a hit along with everything else. How do you make the most out of what you can retain?

In this article, we’ll take a different tack from the usual, focusing more on a process you can use to smartly adapt your marketing plan to current conditions by using a combination of approaches you might not often encounter. We’ll examine some of the key psychological factors at work in your organization to help make you more aware of the traps inherent in panic and to assist you in influencing rational marketing decision-making during this tough period. The economic crisis might have many of you temporarily on your backs, feeling and fighting like underdogs, but there are ways to rise from that position that make a lot of sense.

Managing Panic, Gaining Control

To begin, recognize that you will not be able to panic your way out of current market conditions. So, it is very important not to be controlled by anxious circumstances, and a key factor involves our emotional control. One psychological theory that speaks to this issue describes a “dual mode” approach to problem-solving. The first and oldest mode we use is based on intuition. In this mode (we’ll call it “quick mode”),we look for patterns in a situation we recognize from our past, sort through them rapidly, come to a quick and dirty conclusion, and jump into action. This is our oldest mode of solving problems, one that served our ancestors well and often still serves us today when we face a critical problem that requires action now. However, if this is our preferred and habitual mode of problem-solving, we might find that while it quickly gets us out of range of today’s saber-toothed tiger, it launches us into the jaws of an even deadlier beast.  This “quick mode” is fueled by emotions, so if a situation is panic-ridden, we’re more likely to try to problem-solve this way.

The second mode of problem-solving is of more recent origin and engages more of the cerebral cortex, our modern brain. This is the “thinking mode.” In this mode, we take a more thoughtful, rational, and analytical approach to problem-solving.

It’s important to understand that both these modes are natural and active parts of each of us, and both are always in operation, even if one is dominant at a given time. But when the economic sky is falling, for example, how do we take more thoughtful control of the panic we might be experiencing? One psychology study suggested a simple answer. Researchers learned that how you frame questions can drive one mode or the other into dominance. In the study, subjects were presented with a hypothetical situation. One group was asked how they would respond if the situation happened to them. This phrasing put them into “quick mode” because it made them visualize and personalize the threat. Another group was asked to logically step through how to deal with the same situation. This group went into “thinking mode” because rational thinking was evoked.  Now, while this dual-mode approach to problem-solving may appear obvious to some, what hasn’t been so obvious is how to constructively manage which mode is in charge. It’s usually as straightforward as described above, and often something we’ve done automatically, if not very consciously. Now, let’s consider how to proceed with your marketing plan in an anxious organization.

When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take it

There are two parallel paths to take to adapt your marketing strategy and sell it to your leadership. The first is essential to updating and streamlining your marketing plan using “thinking mode “such that an organization under duress can embrace the plan while retaining the impact needed to advance your company’s business and position it for a powerful leap forward once the economy rebounds.

A great marketing plan unrealized isn’t worth the bits and bytes used to write it. So, the second path helps you clarify the temperament and will of your organization’s leadership, enabling you to be more effective in selling your revised plan. 

Updating Your Marketing Plan

There are a number of key steps (many of which you may have used in the past) to take as you begin to update your plan:

• 1. Understand what has really changed for your organization under the present economic situation

Is it simply weak demand, with all other factors largely unchanged? Or have the market dynamics changed in many ways: competitors slashing prices, particular weakness in industries where you were strong or preparing to enter, delayed product updates/launches, reduced support?

A good “thinking mode” practice is to build 1) a SWOT diagram (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) that reflects your company before the downturn and 2) a second SWOT diagram that reflects your company’s current situation. Make these SWOTs as detailed as possible to get at the specific challenges you’re facing. (See the “Additional Resources” at the end for a Web site with great SWOT tools.) As you’re building them, try your SWOTs out on at least a couple of colleagues in your firm, not only to bulletproof them, but to begin to socialize your marketing plan evolution. Better yet, to accelerate the process, build the SWOTs in collaboration with a couple of key colleagues.

• 2. Make a list in descending order of business impact of which strategies and tactics have delivered the greatest marketing benefit to your organization in the past.

Here is where detailed program and market analytics are invaluable. If you have them, you will know what has worked and what hasn’t worked as well. If you don’t have them, 1) estimate impact based on the best available information you have, and 2) vow to create a plan to regularly gather and analyze program and market performance in the future. Again, socialize this best-to-least listing with key colleagues to deepen support for it and gain their insight.

• 3. Finally, assess your current marketing plan against your business impact analysis above, using a triage approach. Label the one, or at most two, strategies and tactics that present the highest possibility of delivering near-term business success and offer the least business risk with a “1.” Identify the strategies with the greatest risk of success with a “3.” Everything else gets a “2.” As a final step, it is important to stack-rank your “2s” and “3s” to help with budget allocation, addressed below.

Let’s look at what is an often obvious “1″ and a typical “3″ for this economic environment. Many companies’ number “1″ will cite some form of existing customer marketing, since current, successful business relationships tend to yield the most reliable business going forward (I recognize that customers are pulling in spending as well, but if your relationship is strong, they are more likely to spend with you than with an untested competitor). Many companies today would label a brand new market or segment as a “3,” since it will reflect a major investment with unknown prospects to develop any business whatsoever.

• 4. As a starting budget exercise, allocate your budget with 70 percent against your “1s,” 25 percent against your top “2,” and 5 percent against your highest rated “3.”

This allocation accomplishes several things. It urges you to be powerful, energetic, and aggressive against the most important business opportunities you have. Do otherwise, and you will be marketing like a whipped dog, not an underdog. Even with reduced budgets, this forces us to comply with the modern adage, “Go big or go home.” Further, it preserves some resources to apply to important secondary or emerging strategies – but remember, you won’t get a lot accomplished here, so you will need to apply high creativity to drive impact. For example, you may want to explore lower cost public relations opportunities to begin driving a presence in a new market or developing a couple of key application articles and promoting them via search engines.

Accessing What Motivates Your Leadership

Let’s get back to psychology for a moment. Just as you’ve done some work on yourself – and perhaps others – to assess panic and strive to manage it using your “thinking mode,” it’s time to understand how the leadership in your organization that must support this plan is motivated.

You see, while many people in business are directly motivated by success, some motivate themselves more based on fear of loss or failure. It may seem surprising, but it’s a fact – that’s how different people are wired. There are psychological tests that can help determine this, but that’s an impractical activity to pursue in order to build your internal selling approach. You are going to need to be able to address both types of motivation styles.

Here’s how. For those primarily motivated by success, it is essential to create a vision of how effectively your updated marketing strategy will support the organization’s success through these rough times and beyond, and you need to present tangible benefits. For those more driven by a fear of loss or failure, you need to create a vision of what may befall the organization if an effective, appropriate marketing strategy is not supported and mounted, once again, in highly tangible ways. Visions of success and images of failure will allow you to speak to both types of people. Chances are that most of your leadership is motivated by success, so emphasize this vision. But don’t leave out a credible scenario of defeat, perhaps drawing on the fears already expressed in the company. Your leadership must get these things in their guts if they are to be able to overwhelm the anxiety created by the current business situation. How do you create those key messages? They derive principally from your SWOTs, your business impact assessments and prioritization analysis, and your revised marketing recommendation and budget. 

In times such as these, it is important to take stock of your organization’s assets, to create a vision, to support that vision with courage, and to drive your marketing with unheard of precision, efficiency, and energy. As the adage says, “It isn’t the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” Don’t spread reduced resources across too many programs; put all that fight into focused, high-energy, courageous marketing.

Additional Resources

• Here’s a site with helpful SWOT advice and free tools to use: http://www.businessballs.com/swotanalysisfreetemplate.htm. Also, consider trying a PEST (political, economic, social, and technological factors) analysis to help you further understand today’s market issues.
• For a surfeit of very useful advice on how to market during tough economic times, see Jennifer Culbertson’s article and presentation here: http://www.thepartnermarketinggroup.com/consultants-corner-downloads.php

If you’d like to learn more about Richard’s “Underdog Marketing” strategies, contact him at 425-348-1867 or at Richard@thepartnermarketinggroup.com.  

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