Chris Van Veen Marketing Communications

Isn’t it time to start MARKETING again?

Marketing is the exercise corporations undertake to create and foster demand. But what if a soured economy neutralizes this demand? We have two general categories of goods and services: those that we need and those that we want. This economy has wreaked havoc on the 'want' side of the equation. Have you seen many commercials or advertisements for cruise lines? Or pleasure boats? Or airlines? Indeed, there are whole categories of goods and services that you don't see promoted much (or at all) these days. You see evidence of this whenever you pick up TIME or Newsweek; these are pretty thin editions each week, thanks to a dearth of advertising. Radio and TV are sharing the same fate.

So with a year of this 'new reality' behind us, isn't it time to start MARKETING again?

For this to happen, fundamentals need to be in place. Incomes and employment not only need to stabilize, but grow. Consumers who have been browbeaten into focusing on 'need-to-have' rather than 'want-to-have' items are placing a huge strain on companies that largely offer things in the latter category. It's tough to find rationale for marketing a cruise line when consumers have snapped their purses and wallets shut.

Does this mean that makers of 'want-to-have' goods and services simply fold up their tent and call it a day? No, because that's not the American way. The American way is to come up with a new paradigm if the old or present one stops working. And everything in corporate America during the 1990s was about 'paradigm shifts.' Well, here's a paradigm shift for the ages. So what will corporations do about it within the context of marketing?

The first thing is to recognize that our fortunes are cyclic. In other words, 'We've Seen This Movie Before.'  That's why there's not a whole lot of 'tent-folding' going on. You'll see retrenchment everywhere you look, because corporations realize that it's tough to use 'marketing' to climb out of a recessionary grasp. But we do know that better times will return, because 'better' is simply a relative term we use in context with a preceding period of time. At some point our trend toward 'worse' ought to stop heading in that downward direction and start going the other way.

Once we recognize that things are cyclic and that 'better times are on the way,' the next thing is to be ready for it. This economic collapse has been a shock to the system, in macro terms and micro terms. The stock market is nowhere near where it was years ago (macro) and I'm now a happy customer at The Dollar Tree store (micro). Our savings rate is increasing, which means that consumers are deciding to do a couple things. First, they're still going to focus more on 'needs' rather than 'wants.' The money will go toward milk before it goes toward a milkshake.

But this isn't to say that the desire for 'wants' will go away. It simply says that people are going to be more value-driven. And that's where marketers can shine, by focusing on benefits more than features. Take more time to show the steak more than the sizzle. The job of marketing hasn't necessarily gotten tougher; it's now just a more focused play on what the advantages are when a consumer opens their wallet and says 'yes.'