5 Tips for Building Your Brand in a Recession
A few quick thoughts for those of you still looking for the silver lining in the cloud of gloom that surrounds us …
- Find your core customer - This is trickier that it sounds because your core customers may not be the biggest spenders. They are the people who attract others to your business, who are the “acid test” for your brand and who represent your brand in the minds of other customers.
- Become a direct marketer - Test everything before you commit large dollars. Instead of running a huge promotion, try it on a small group of customers and see how it does. Send out an e-mail to 1,000 prospects before you reach out to 100,000.
- Add value instead of cutting price - If your price is grossly unrealistic, lower it. But first consider bundling in extra value at current prices. Add samples, extra services or custom consultations. You’ll increase the value of your offerings but help maintain your price points, which are harder to raise than cut.
- Narrow your brand positioning - A recession is a tempting time to try to be all things to all people just to maintain revenue. But people are drawn to expertise more than ever in a recession and nothing shows expertise better than a narrow focus. Even if you don’t cut products or services, make sure your communications focus on your core expertise.
- Look for opportunities - Save marketing dollars to spend opportunistically. Large competitors in particular tend to make marketing cuts in big chunks and implement them very quickly. This can leave bargains in media or even PR. Watch your competitors closely to find the best moment to spend instead of pre-planning all of your expenditures. If your business is seasonal, save extra money to capitalize on unexpected media or PR opportunities during your high season.
March 7th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
I am very impressed with and actively look for new concepts and approaches to online advertising. My company has been working in online advertising to create a new platform for interactive, “do-it-yourself” ad creation and distribution. I am including a very brief description of what we do at CinFlare and with Flare Ads. I am very interested in your comments and suggestions. I think there is tremendous potential for monetizing this concept. Thank you in advance.
My company CinFlare, www.cinflare.com, introduces a new portable e-commerce technology, where users create portable shopping carts for their social networking profiles, blogs, personal pages, etc. These shopping carts are fully interactive, Paypal enabled, and allow real-time edit, and update of content, products, pictures, audio, and video, through a very user friendly web interface. In fact, our users are able to update their carts from their mobile phones, and sell goods directly from their facebook, blogs, and personal pages!
In addition to the cart, CinFlare provides a full range of “self-service”, Online Display Advertising and Marketing Platform. This technology allows users to create fully interactive web ads featuring audio, video, graphics, animation, etc. Using CinFlare it takes only minutes to create advanced online services such as customer feedback forms, polls, promotions, coupons, and announcements. All services are template-based, where users simply select a template, customize it with their content, graphics, logo, personal message, and they are done (Gigya Wildfire takes care of publishing!). There is never any programming, webmaster, or IT involved. This new technology allows “YOU promote YOU” concept. A simple and intuitive web interface gives our users, sellers, and advertisers full control to seamlessly connect, create, edit, and publish new ads and new content to thousands of web outlets.
What makes our technology different:
• Ads that function as mini-applications or widgets served on ad networks.
• Viewers interact with these ads or mini-applications without leaving the host site.
• E-commerce that is portable. Why sell from one site when you can sell from thousands? A portable shopping cart would bring the “point-of-sales” to the viewer, as part of an interactive display ad.
• Our users are in full control, and everything happens in real time. No ad agencies, no webmasters, no IT professionals … Advertisers interact directly with publishers and their viewers.
CinFlare is actively partnering with businesses who want to bring the power of display advertising solution to their existing customer base. Whether they are an ad agency looking to leverage the CinFlare’s solution for their clients, or a business with a strong base of business customers who are looking for new ways to grow their businesses, we want to work with them.
Your team can work directly with us to offer self-service display advertising to your clients, or we can build a private label solution that enables you to bring new products and value to your customer base.
Our vision is to transform the way users interact with blogs, social networks, business, entertainment, and the web itself. We believe that our technology will greatly enhance and aid in the efforts to monetize social networks and blogs, and personal web sites. More importantly, our vision is to partner with innovative technology leaders in the new world
If you are interested, please write back with your comments and suggestions.
Thank you,
Kevin Tehrani
info@cinflare.com
(310) 480-0458 Cell
March 11th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
The words of wisdom in this recession are applicable to businesses large and small. All of us need to work harder and offer more.
Things will come to those who keep pushing to be successful.
Boston Photographer
March 16th, 2009 at 7:10 am
I am a PR consultant. I think the new Doritos name that chip campaign is fairly brilliant. But from what I see from the entries, I don’t know what they would pick, most of the ad ideas are garbage or perhaps unrelated to the product. Chips and pubic hair for example?
http://www.doritosguru.ca/dutch%20tokyo/A%20taste%20of%20Brazil
March 19th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Great tips. Adding value is very important. People are spending less and when they do spend they want to get a great value for their dollar.
March 20th, 2009 at 10:05 am
Hello! My name is Jeremy Parker and I am a 23 year old entrepreneur. I am
the CEO of Tees and Tats, a high-end, limited edition t-shirt line
designed by world renown tattoo artist Marco Serio. We launched the
line last July, with much success, selling to many high-end boutiques
all over the US and Canada. But starting last November, are sales
starting to slow dramatically as with the rest of the economy. A
large percentage of the stores we were selling to - closed, and the
stores that have survived are not placing re-orders.
I did not want to concede to failure- because if the entrepreneurial
spirit dies, America will be in a much worse place. I knew the store
issue would still be a problem, because high-end retailers are not
buying goods anymore, but I came up with an idea that I thought might
help our online sales.
I first lowered our prices from $110 to $55. This helped a little
bit, but people where still not buying like we saw earlier. So I came
up with a concept that at the time seemed bizarre, but now has proven
to be a savior for us.
Now when a customer buys a shirt on our website (www.teesandtats.com),
they are told the price of the DOW. For every 100 points that the DOW
drops within two months after the time of purchase they receive $5
dollars off of their purchase. For example if a customer buys a shirt
for $55 dollars and the DOW is 8200 and two months later the DOW is
8000 - the customer gets a check in the mail for $10 dollars. The
reason why people aren’t buying high-end fashion- is that they are
nervous about affording food, rent and other necessary living
expenses. Obviously very understandable. So by assuring them that if
the economy deteriorates even more they would get some money back –
it made it very enticing for many customers. Our sales have been up
significantly since we started this.
One important additional element to the Tees and Tats philosophy is
our desire to give back. For every T-shirt sold in the initial
collection, we are going donate a percentage of proceeds to the
non-profit ArtWorks Foundation. Based in Englewood, N.J., ArtWorks
provides children and young adults suffering from chronic and
life-threatening illnesses, and their siblings, access to creative and
performing arts programming which encourages the use of the creative
process as a vehicle for healing, communication, self-expression, and
personal development.
I just want to thank you for listening to my story, and I want to say
that as things are looking bad and seems to be getting even worse– It
is going to be the American people who are going to fix this problem.
Best Wishes,
Jeremy Parker
April 7th, 2009 at 10:29 am
I run a small company and the recession makes me re-examine my advertising budget. I ran across claims that publicity may be much more cost effective than advertising, but found no formal studies on it. I always thought PR was too expensive for small businesses but in doing my research I posted my project on AllPublicists.com (it’s a free service), and got many low-cost offers from publicists. One firm for example, called Publicity Guaranteed (PublicityGuaranteed.com) doesn’t charge anything unless they deliver results. However, most companies still put much more reliance on advertising than on PR. Is it because pay-for-results-only publicity such a new option or am I missing something? Are there any studies on the subject?
May 4th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
The recession has hit us too and we are in the branding marketplace by selling personalized promotional pens and other swag type items.
We are finding that the market is not just looking for promotional items now but “cheap promotional items”. The need to brand is constant and more important now than ever before. It’s just gotta cost less.
If you do use promotional materials or give out swag decide on ones that will last and be used regularly. You don’t want your name thrown in the trash or in the hands of kids that can’t read or do business with you yet! It’s that “opportunistically” approach you mention.
July 22nd, 2009 at 11:08 pm
You offer up some great ideas here, great work. I totally agree with your idea of finding your core customer and adding value to what you have to offer. I have found that attending trade shows is a great way to accomplish both of these steps. You can spend some quality time with customers who are at the show seeking what you have to offer. They are at the trade show for a reason and are more willing to listen to your sales pitch and give instant and more coherent feedback. You can also sweeten the deal or add value to your product by offering them a special trade show discount or a company product freebie.
July 28th, 2009 at 4:37 am
the recession has made its mark on everyone whatever the size of the business. here’s to a better outlook in the near future for us all.
August 13th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
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August 26th, 2009 at 12:07 am
Great tips. Adding value to your product can I believe help you find your core customer. I think listening to customer feedback is extremely important as well. You not only have to pay attention to their feedback, but also be willing to change and adapt based around the consumers opinions.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:20 am
One word - Social!