Essential Reading for Marketing & Business Professionals

Thursday 9th October

In this Issue:
* Beating the Recession
* Are you ready for "ZCM"?
* Cut your database budgets down to size

Will the £400Bn bank bail-out work? Is the UK now in
recession? What will happen today? The answer to all
of these is, of course, a resounding "don't know". So
what does the prudent marketer do? Do you cut
activity? - This risks reducing demand, thus forcing
more cuts in a nasty vicious spiral. Do you squeeze
suppliers to do more for less? - This risks lowering
quality and greater errors. Or do you do things
differently?<r><r>
In this issue we take a look at how you might do things
differently.

James Pearson - Editor

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Beating the Recession

OK, lets bear in mind that a recession does NOT
mean
everyone stops buying. All it means is that growth
stops and sales volumes decline for two quarters.
People keep on shopping, companies keep on
spending. Why? Because they have to. Some products
we have to keep buying - food, energy, cleaning
products, replacements for things that fail. New
investment continues as companies still have to
replace the old, repair the broken and keep ahead of
the competition.

Not all consumers are affected by recession - some
are immune. For example Doctors, teachers, nurses,
the very rich, those not in work and the retired. And
recessions are as much about confidence as they are
reality. In certain parts of the country attitudes are far
more robust than others. Londoners and those in the
South-West are more positive than Midlanders, for
example (I'm from Leicester, so I'm feeling fairly
miserable!)

Companies in certain sectors are completely immune
- some because of massively long order books
(aerospace, for example); some because they service
government; yet others because they thrive on the
misfortunes of others (Accountants, for example). One
recent example we found is a company that provides
spares to heavy machinery. Their business is
booming
because their customers are in "fix and make do"
mode rather than "replace" mode.

The upshot is that opportunity still exists - but you
need
to think far more carefully about who will be willing to
spend versus who won't - and target accordingly.
Traditional tools won't help here because they are so
heavily based on what happened before. Normal
analytics don't work when the paradigm shifts, At MI
we
have recognised this with our Recession-Proof Index
tool that helps you identify the best opportunities for
your products or services.

Marketing, if it is about anything, is about matching
products and services to customers who are willing
and able to buy. In good times marketing is easy -
people will buy any old rubbish. In bad times good
marketers come to the fore because it is no longer
about bigger budgets but about bigger brains!

If you would like to know more about the Recession-Proof Index, click here

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Are you ready for "ZCM"?

ZCM is all the rage and coming from a competitor near
you right now. ZCM is "Zero Cost Marketing". When
budgets are under pressure smart marketing
departments turn to look at what they can do for little,
or better, no cost. Here are our top 3 favourites - in no
particular order.

Tip 1 - Email

- no, we don't mean email marketing - that's no
actually zero cost. We mean using the emails your
company sends out in the normal course of business
to promote your product. We use a technology called
RocketSeed to embed small promotional messages
in ALL our day-to-day emails. Depending on the
size of your company, that could add up to many
thousands of FREE messages going out every day!

Tip 2 - Data

Again, data isn't free. But every moment of every day
your colleagues are interacting with potential
customers. Find strategies for getting their email
addresses AND permission to use them. Any call-
centre script should be modified to say "can I have
your email address, so we can keep in touch with you
by email?" - for example. At ALL customer touch points
ensure there is a mechanism for gathering emails!

Tip 3 - Networking

Web 2.0 really comes into its own in a downtown.
Word of mouth assumes even greater importance as
people search out elusive bargains. Strategies based
around social networking cost nothing to implement -
especially if you have staff who are now less than busy
because budget custs have hit other activities

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Cut your database budgets down to size

Is your marketing database costing you more than you
would like or delivering less than you hoped? In a
recent survey 74% of Marketing Managers shared your
view. Many expressed problems. Services like
Salesforce.com often turn out vastly more expensive
and more inflexible than was first thought. Bureaux
prove inordinately expensive every time even the most
minor change is needed. And companies that
"bundle" data provision with data services are often
not very good at data management.

Our clients have been looking at a new approach to
marketing databases built around three fundamental
principals:

Principle 1 - Use your own data

Fact is, most external data is not very good. Yet it is
often easier to obtain than data from internal
sources. We have developed highly effective solutions
that make it easy and automatic.
.

Principle 2 - Flexicate

A Marketing Database MUST be flexible, capable of
rapid, easy and inexpensive change - from adding
new fields or new feeds to implementing new
features. And it must be highly automated to ensure
the maximum benefit is extracted from every piece of
data you have. We call this "Flexication".

Principle 3 - Lower costs

A Marketing Database must NOT be an expensive
"nice to have" - it must earn its keep. In our survey we
found that companies were paying, on average, 40%
more and in some cases 200%
more than they should be for their marketing
database. Unless you have low cost, but high quality
database it will be very hard to make Direct Marketing
deliver the returns it should.

Click here to find out more