Coming Back Different

Here’s a tried-and-true business rule: a downturn is not the time to cut marketing.

But in practice, many businesses toss that rule aside. After all, a dip in revenue can be balanced out by reducing the marketing budget pretty easily – am I right?

During a crisis like COVID-19, however, it’s a different story. The reduction in revenue is steep, and the need to tell people whether you’re open or closed, what your new hours are, what your new products are, what your new safety protocols are – feels more essential than ever.

The pressure of this crisis has proved out the old rule.

Many are talking about ways we should come back from COVID-19 different and better than we were. We’re not hard-wired to enjoy change, so it’s easy to just keep on keepin’ on. But now change is happening whether we like it or not. Our economy is struggling. Debt is rising. Layoffs are mounting. We need to take this opportunity to identify the things that will make us come back stronger and more resilient, and get right on that.

Marketing is one of those things.

If you’ve ever balanced out a dip in revenue by cutting the marketing budget, if you’ve ever thought marketing was frivolous and optional, if you’ve ever assumed that marketing can be done by “just anyone”, or if you find yourself adding marketing responsibilities to someone on your team who is already doing three things off the corner of their desk – you’re doing it wrong, and it has to stop.

Marketing is business strategy, and businesses need to value it as such. When it is really flexing its muscles, it answers questions like: Who are we? What problem do we solve? How are we different from our competition? Who are our customers? What matters to them? What is our customer journey? What is our reputation?

If businesses are thinking about these questions at all, the answers often arise organically instead of strategically. You might have a brand, a sales funnel, and a fulfilment process – but do they work? Do they drive revenue?

Let’s break these ideas down into manageable bits.

Harvard Business School Professor Theodore Levitt famously said: “people don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”

Let’s say you make and sell drills. The hole the drill makes is the benefit of owning a drill. The cabin a customer builds is the value of owning a drill. The family time at that cabin is the reward of owning a drill.

That’s brand at work. It takes a functional thing and attaches powerful emotional value to it, which builds preference and affinity among customers.

Let’s say you are a drill salesperson. Your company’s marketing efforts have put a customer in front of you. How do you lead that customer through the qualification process, helping them through the decisions that need to happen before a purchase is made? Is your drill made with high-quality standards (the quality decision), will it do what the customer needs it to do (the functional decision), can they easily use it (the fit decision), and can they afford it (the price decision).

That’s a sales funnel at work. It back-fills a foundation of practical information about your product or service, shoring up the initial emotional attraction and completing the picture for your customers. A sales funnel is at play whether you’re selling enterprise software or a scoop of ice cream.

Let’s say your customer decides to buy your drill, and they bring it home. They unbox it. They register the product. They call customer support because they’ve run into an issue. How you support that customer post-sale is a critical reputation builder. Do you stand by your products? How important is the customer relationship?

That’s the fulfilment process at work. Ensuring your customers become champions for your business is the long tail of the marketing relationship, and done properly, it will send more leads your way.

See how doing it right makes you more successful over time? That’s the goal.

The tricky thing is that the answers to all these questions are supplied by you AND your customers. You might say: we are makers of high-quality do-it-yourselfer tools. But your customer might say: you are makers of crappy drills. Your entire company’s business strategy should be dedicated to narrowing the gap between those answers, drawing your customers ever closer to what you want them to say about your products, your team, and your business.

Marketing is how you express that strategy. An ad, or a social media post – these things are tactics. If they don’t reflect strategic work you’ve done in the background, it’s time to do better.

If we want to grow our economy we must boost exports of both products and services, and we must broaden and deepen our tourism offerings. To do that means we need to compete in much bigger markets. If we don’t come to that table with our marketing house in order, it’s going to be a wasted effort.

Now is the time to ask all these questions about our businesses. Even if you’re doing it at the cabin you built yourself during lockdown.