Marketing in a Recession – Paul Fifield

After a 63 quarter party you’re going to have a hangover…

These were the words of Paul Fifield who recently gave an entertaining talk on marketing in a recession. According to Paul there is an approximate 80 year cycle in the economy and this recession is “bang on schedule”. After 16 years of continuous growth the balance between fear and greed has become distorted. For a free market system to work properly fear and greed need to be aligned, when you remove the fear then greed takes over.

During these years of continuous growth, Paul maintained that the Marketing profession adopted a lemming rationale and blindly followed what their competitors did. The basic tenets of Marketing were forgotten, i.e. that the only reason to market your product is so that you can charge a higher price – this is the only source of revenue you have. How do you do this? By adding customer value.

For Paul, the key to surviving the recession was to go back to basics and concentrate on your brand. The successful company will differentiate their product, segment their market and align their organisation to the basic brand values. In other words, Marketing 101. Throughout the evening he quoted a number of examples of what he called “hollowed out brands” – those companies who have, for one reason and another, destroyed their brand during the good times. Within this “hall of shame” resides organisations such as Sony, Starbucks, Bodyshop and British Airways. Those that got it right include Walkers, First Direct, Apple, Nokia and Ford.

Peppering his presentation with entertaining and highly relevant quotations, attendees were reminded that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santayana) and learnt that “you cannot fatten the pig on market day” (John Howard). Perhaps the most pertinent though were the words written by the economist E F Schumacher in 1973 “Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is impossibility”.

Email: PaulFifield@Fifield.co.uk

Web: http://www.Fifield.co.uk