#1 Getting a Running Start: Good marketing is about consistency and campaigning. Building a strong brand and ad campaign takes time. If you get the ball rolling now, you’ll be at top speed when customer purse strings start to loosen – while your competitors are still in “recovery mode.”
#3 Keep Thinking Creatively: When innovation succeeds, it invites more innovation. Encourage creative thinking and good ideas will become part of your corporate culture not just during hard economic times but at all times. Likewise, innovation may become part of your identity to external audiences – a company that thrived in the recession because it was agile and innovative.
Last week, I was given permission to make public my involvement in the book that is sweeping the nation! (OK, maybe it’s just sweeping the third grade class at Lakeside Elementary in Coppell, Texas, but allow me some poetic license.) Last year, I wrote Prince Buddy from notes, interviews and newspaper clippings provided by Lakeside Principal Mark Lukert. Late last year, Mr. Lukert found a publisher and now more than 500 copies have sold (mostly via Mark’s extensive professional network of Texas public school educators.) The even better news is that the Lewisville Barnes & Noble has agreed to stock the book! Woohoo! There’s even to be a book signing (by Mark; I’m just the ghost writer).
Prince Buddy is probably not hitting the NYT Best Seller list anytime soon, but it was a fun project and teaches kids (if any of them don’t get too bored to read the whole thing) some valuable lessons about kindness, patience, acceptance and hard work.
And here’s a super-secret insider’s tip: look for a Prince Buddy sequel sometime next year!
(The 6ths installment in a list of reasons to invest in marketing during the recession.)
#4 Think Creatively: The best marketing is always based on a creative idea. Slow economies force you to be creative. You can’t sell the same product or service the same way at the same price as before. See the recession as a training ground to stretch your creative capacity that might open up to new lines of business or better efficiencies.
I’ve been having a great discussion with the Social Media group over on LinkedIn. (http://tinyurl.com/mcclzp)
The latest round has gotten us going on credibility and trust in both new media and traditional media. Reminds me of a column I wrote for Chatter years ago. I thought it might be worth a reprise. Read the whole thing here. It’s pretty long and really more about church than culture. But here’s an excerpt that might make for good conversation:
Fifty years ago, what you knew was very important. We elected leaders and trusted teachers if they had amassed an impressive amount of information. They must have studied. They must have done research in windowless libraries with dusty books. But now information (both good and bad, accurate and inaccurate) is available to a much wider audience with must less effort in its discovery. Thus we don’t value knowledge as much as our grandparents did. We elect politicians because we liked them in a movie or a sport. We shrug when a president can’t recall the name of a country’s foreign minister…
Witness this blog. I don’t have a degree in social science of any kind so why read something by someone who is obviously not an authority on the subject? Or consider the blog format at all: part of the function of newspapers and publishers used to be that they were vouching for their content. The reporter or essayist was someone who knew their stuff, someone the public could trust. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have his own book or column. So why do post-moderns read blogs by people they don’t know and don’t know if they can trust? Because facts aren’t as important as they used to be. Facts are cheap. Thus the teacher, the person with all the answers, is no longer the leader we’re drawn to follow. In fact, we’re suspicious of anyone who has answers.
The REACH Blog 