I was in Kelowna, B.C., earlier this week. If you haven't been, you should. It is absolutely spectacular. Vineyards cover the ridges and bluffs paradoxically in this arid, desert-like area bounding Okanagan Lake. A visible line, halfway up the surrounding hills, separates lush from the bluff. Beautiful. Great golf courses. Better wineries. And some tremendous (western Canadian) brands. Why doesn't someone bring White Spot, the upscale burger joint, or the Cactus Club Café, which would fit between the Firkins and The Keg, to Ontario?
Alas, it was not a vacation. The gig: speaking at a conference on senior living communities. I'm not what you would call an expert in this space, so fortunately the topic was how to market your way out of a recession. As I prepared the talk in the weeks leading up the conference, it was becoming more obvious: For some businesses the slow times drag on, but for many others the recession is basically over.
Now what?
Most of my colleagues in professional services agree – you should consider three levels when preparing to roar out of the post-recession gate: basic, aggressive and bold.
- Basic is just that – the bare minimum planning required to not get caught with your head in the sand while competitors are ramping up.
- Aggressive means trying to steal share while competitors are still in the starting blocks.
- Bold refers to a well-timed big bet. Maybe not bet-the-farm big, but big.
- And planning in this fashion is not reserved for large enterprises. Small and medium businesses can and should be thinking this way. It's not the total budget but the process and strategy that are important.
Basic
I know I harp on this topic a lot, but if there was ever a time when understanding your value proposition, your customers and your market was important, it is right now . Has your industry structurally changed – or not? Are your customers looking for different features, or price points – or not? You'll find many entirely accurate stories in the mass media and trade pubs on consumer confidence levels, retail sales trends, etc. The problem for you, Mr. or Mrs. Business Owner/Operator, is these numbers are aggregates. They don't necessarily reflect what your customers are thinking, or what your competitors are planning, or what your channel partners are doing.
Ok, fine. How?
Value proposition clarity
This could be a whole topic for another day, but here is the most straightforward way to tackle value proposition clarity: Gather your management team for an afternoon offsite and challenge yourselves to leave with one-sentence answers to the following questions:
- Who are we?
- What do we do?
- What makes us special?
Some guiding questions you can use along the way include “why do customers really buy from us?” and “what expertise of ours could we defend in a court of law?”
I know these questions sound remedial, but I promise you the exercise will be enlightening, and will tighten your value proposition – and in turn your positioning, messaging, advertising, etc.
Customer insight
As my mom would say, there are more ways to unearth how customers are feeling and what they are thinking about, post-recession, than you can shake a stick at. You can survey, or interview or focus-group, or observe, or use any other number of data/insight/analysis tools. But the bit that really matters here is: Don't guess. Don't assume. Don't hypothesize. Go find out. Take a shift behind the till. Go out into a sales territory. Put a survey on your invoices or receipts. Talk to customers and find out what they want.
Market intelligence
Again, the methodology is less important here than the information objectives. In order to have a good handle on your market, you need to be on top of three factors:
Trends – They usually boil down to pricing, marketing or pressures coming from a non-industry source (such as pressure to be greener). A PEST analysis (political, economic, sociological, technological) is an old-school but still effective tool.
Competitors – Here, you can never know enough. If you know a little about them, do your homework and learn a lot about them. You want to know about their pricing strategies and price points, their positioning and their customer bases.
