Articles
It’s time to get the
message
Why your customers will never be the same
by John Graham“Let’s put it all behind us.” These few words capture
Americans’ unquenchable optimism. If there’s a roadblock, we
go around it and no hurdle is ever too high. Nothing stops us. We regroup
and move on. Besides, tomorrow will be a better day.
Without such a heritage, we would be a far lesser nation.
Yet, there is nothing less than a sea-change taking place. We have been forced
to turn to Middle Eastern and Asian countries to save us from financial disaster,
the same ones that have long been siphoning off millions of U.S. jobs.
If all this isn’t enough, we are rendered impotent to do anything about
rising energy costs and falling home prices. The situation is so serious that
hundreds of thousands of consumers have abandoned their homes before foreclosure.
On top of all that, we’ve parked our pickups and abandoned buying SUVs.
At the supermarket, SPAM sales have shot up for the first time in 40 years, while
canned beans fly off the shelves and shopping carts are filled with macaroni
and cheese. Half the current crop of college graduates is boomeranging back home
and families are missing from family restaurants.
Unquestionably, our country and the economy are in the midst of what may be an
unprecedented upheaval that no one can escape. Incredibly, however, many in sales
and marketing seem to ignore the unpleasant realities, even pretending the harsh
realities don’t exist.
But in the words of Warren Buffett, “The party’s over.”
Rather than burying our heads in the sand, a much more productive approach is
to discover the marketing and sales messages that make sense to customers in
a clearly painful economic situation. Here are five essential marketing and sales
themes:
1. It’s time to stop pretending nothing has changed. It
took a decade for General Motors and Ford Motor Company to finally confess
that the auto-buying public wants small, fuel-efficient vehicles. They
are on life support today because they couldn’t resist blaming
their problems on just about everything else as they failed to see that
they were the ones on the wrong road.
There’s a huge lesson in all this. It’s not just that buying behavior
has changed. There’s far more to it: Those in marketing and sales often
persist in the belief that it’s someone else’s customers whose buying
behavior has changed. They want to believe that their customers are different.
We want to believe that we will get over this and every other hurdle and all
will once again be well. When the term “downsizing” was first heard
nearly 20 years ago, we said it was a temporary situation, even though there
were indications that it was a permanent part of the corporate landscape.
The point: Basing marketing and sales on what we want to believe
rather than reality can and will hurt us.
2. Recognize that caution prevails. Let’s face
it, there’s a serious problem when the auto repo trucks roam the
nation’s suburban neighborhoods day and night, while a Mortgage
Bankers Association report indicates that nearly 1 in 10 American homeowners
with a mortgage faced foreclosure or fell behind in their payments in
the first quarter of 2008.
Then, pile on the dramatic downsizing of the nation’s airlines, add widespread
job insecurity and the fact that companies are warning employees to be alert
to gas tank thefts and there’s a flood of uncertainty and fear. To ignore
this situation is a strategic mistake.
A more beneficial approach is to create marketing strategies and sales messages
that acknowledge the uncertainty and demonstrate how buying your products or
using your services minimizes risk and creates greater security.
The point: No one wants to get in too deep into anything. Offering
assurance that customers will avoid getting in trouble is an appealing
message.
3. The desire to do “something” is strong. Whether
the current “green revolution” is real or a fad is irrelevant.
There may be some of both. The cynics are always quick to point out that
such activities as annual “clean up the town”
days or “save the something or other” are more PR than practical.
Even so, in times of crisis, people want to feel that they are doing
something to help. They remember these experiences for years to come.
It’s difficult to get our arms around “global warming”
and we’re impotent when it comes to doing anything about the price
of oil. Yet, we want to feel that we’re helping and the current
green movement is a way to take a stand.
During World War II, millions of Americans planted “Victory Gardens,”
collected scrap rubber (including millions of elastics), cans of fat
and tons of metal. All this may have helped “the war effort,”
but it also gave Americans the opportunity to be involved.
The point: Finding ways to support and align ourselves with the “green
revolution” or similar movements that allow consumers and companies
to feel they are making a difference and that we are all in this together
has value.
4. Life is filled with disappointment. No matter how
you look at it, Americans are being bombarded with disappointment––pensions
are disappearing, the cost of living increases and the day one can retire
is fading. Even the horizons of those largely unaffected by such experiences
are changing.
As Sandra Block of USA Today writes, “Patty Stewart of Redlands,
Calif., is beginning to think she won’t be able to retire at 65. Or 67.
Or possibly ever.” With the drop in her 401(k) and the equity in her home
sinking fast, retirement may be an illusion.
Since the 1950s, we have been able to gratify more desires than any people on
earth, culminating in the bizarre belief that $50,000 or $60,000 annual incomes
could support $400,000 and $600,000 mortgages. Just wanting it made it happen.
Now, disappointment prevails. Even Boomers are moving back with their parents,
and their kids are joining two generations under the same roof.
To some extent, gratification is not just being delayed; it is disappearing.
The point: The genius of Starbucks is immediate, low-cost gratification.
It took the founder to see that the company had strayed from this path. The product
is affordable, immediate gratification, a powerful message in all marketing and
sales today.
5. Get off of the slam-dunk sales mentality. Selling
is a tough job, but had it not been for a population that could afford
the plethora of products and services produced by U.S. corporations,
it would have been a thousand times more difficult.
Companies have been able to raise quotas, cut commissions, minimize territories
and give little support to their salespeople and get away with it, primarily
because most of the fruit was waiting to fall to the ground.
That party is over, too, leaving companies unhappy with their salespeople and
salespeople making excuses but who don’t really know what’s wrong.
The problem was expressed by an insurance agency president when he said,
“What we need is more sales,” as if there is some magical
way to turn doubting, worried, cautious, reluctant customers into instant
buyers. He is not alone with his “slam-dunk sales mentality.”
The point: The marketing-sales challenge today is one of identifying
and cultivating specific customers with messages that speak to their
perceptions and understanding of where they are in life. That takes time,
time and more time. We have left “getting the sale” behind
and now we are in a period where “deserving the sale” prevails.
The only real marketing and sales challenge today is having the strength and
will to take our marketing and sales direction from our customers instead of
from our companies.
John R. Graham is president of Graham Communications, a marketing services and sales consulting firm. He is the author of The New Magnet Marketing and Break the Rules Selling, writes for a variety of business publications, and speaks on business, marketing and sales issues. Contact him at 40 Oval Road, Quincy, MA 02170; 617-328-0069; jgraham@grahamcomm.com.