Catching Clients On The Rebound

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May 1, 2002 by Josh Gordon

Byline: Josh Gordon

While ad spending in most industries and categories is not bouncing back to heady pre-recession days, there are indications that it is improving - and there are ways that you can coax spending along. But spreading the news of a turnaround and preaching the lessons of missed opportunities that accompany recovery are not enough. Ad budgets were deliberately cut during the recession, and there is internal pressure to keep expenses low even as business starts to pick up.

To reposition your magazine as an essential ad buy for the recovery, you need to access your client's recession strategy. It's as simple as asking three questions and using the answers to re-rationalize your media buy:

question 1:

"How did the recession affect your business"?

Recession gives the people running the companies you call on license to make changes. Chances are, they've all reduced costs to make up for lost revenues, but smart organizations will have gone further and used recessionary times to make the kinds of "adjustments" that would ordinarily raise eyebrows in the markets they sell to. One account of mine re-evaluated their entire product line and eliminated marginally profitable lines; another redesigned workflow in the company to be more cost effective; another down-sized personnel to achieve lower costs; and another invested in new products that they knew a competitor was discontinuing due the hard times.

Chances are, there is a success story resulting from these often-painful "adjustments," and that's a great advertising message that should be shared with your client's customer base as the recession winds down. Helping a client identify a recession success story is a great step toward creating a new ad budget.

question 2:

"How do you want your customers to view your company when the recession is over?"

Recessions tend to make your clients focus more internally. As a recession winds down, the challenge is to get your clients focused more externally.

But recessions are also a time when your client's customers re-evaluate their suppliers. Cash-strapped buyers are going to be looking for better pricing, watching carefully for declining quality among suppliers hurt by the recession.

In a perfect world, all of your clients would have a well-articulated business plan that they implemented for coping with this aspect of the recession. Creating an ad campaign to explain their approach to their buyers is the natural order of well-run companies. But many of my small- to mid-size companies started thinking about sharing these ideas with their customers only when I brought it up on a call. If your clients have failed to protect themselves with a business plan and matching ad campaign, you have a natural opening for the post-recession period.

question 3

"Is your marketing budget going to be cut?"

The sagging economy may be picking up, but I still hear tales of further ad budget cutbacks. In good times, asking such a question would be blasphemy. After all, why bring up a negative idea that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy? But in an environment colored by recession, cost cutting is still on everyone's mind. And most clients are grateful that I mention it before they're forced to break the bad news. No one enjoys the harder questions or conversations that result, but if you know what cost-cutting measures might be coming around the bend, you will have a better chance at defending against them.

In the past couple of months, a few ad contracts that I thought were locked in for the year were later subjected to complete downward revisions. These days, it's best to ask the questions and be sure you know what might be coming - or, to put it another way, it's better to have the tiger in front of you than behind you.

re-rationalize the ad buy

Every company that buys ad space from you has its own specific reasons for doing so. But a recession can kill off those reasons fast. Consider the following:

"We advertise in your publication because our competitors do." When the downturn struck, I had an advertiser pull out of my publication because several of its competitors had dropped all of their advertising.

"We advertise to generate sales leads." One CEO told me, "Why run ads now? Your readers aren't buying now - and by the time they get cash in their pockets, they'll forget that I didn't run any ads with you for six months."

"We advertise to introduce new products." But companies are using the recession to eliminate marginally profitable products, not introduce new ones. And while doing this in good times might be seen as a sign of weakness, in recessionary times, customers are more forgiving.

But armed with feedback from the above three questions, you can re-rationalize your media buy to counteract recessionary thinking. In response to those three simple questions, clients have told me:

"We want our customers to know that we stood by them during the recession and are coming out of it stronger than ever."

"We want our customers to understand how much more focused we are on their business."