Driving down the New Jersey Turnpike to visit a Council member, a billboard caught my eye (please, no jokes about the Turnpike and billboards). It read as follows – “Recession 101: Interesting fact about recessions . . . they end.” Pithy and humorous, I thought. When I reached my hotel, I did some searching and the Recession 101 campaign is nationwide, paid for by members of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America and designed by an unnamed private donor.
Seeing the billboard and scrolling through Recession 101’s Twitter feed (sidebar: good social media integration with ‘traditional’ media), it did prompt me to realize that our members are asking one question with increasing frequency – does MLC think that the economy has turned the corner? You can almost sense the growing desire for us to just say yes, and everyone would exhale after a year of collective hyperventilation. Some economic indicators point positively – the Dow Jones is nearing the psychological point of 10,000, consumer sentiment is at its highest point since January 2008, and GDP projections for Q3 and Q4 are positive. Others are like the weird uncle at the family reunion that just won’t go away – unemployment is still rising, durable goods spending took a nosedive post-Cash for Clunkers, and analysts predict that foreclosures won’t actually peak until late next year. But as one Recession 101 billboard reminds us: this is a test, not a final.
In the business world, that test really never ends; it’s just that the questions change. And so here at CEB, we’ve looked across all our programs to find six enemies of post-recession performance—the new set of questions for the test to come. Top on that list is sharply lower marketing and sales productivity due to changed customer needs. If Marketing and Sales don’t react quickly to these changing needs, companies could face channel output reductions of 15% or more. That’s ‘weird uncle at the reunion’ territory. We need to vigilantly revisit customer needs – especially their emotional ones – and map those needs to our unique capabilities. There’s much more to learn here from across the organization and I encourage you to check out the totality of our Executive Guidance for 2010. I’ll leave you with on final billboard phrase: no one can foreclose on your future.
Related posts:
Commenting Guidelines
We hope conversations will be energetic, constructive, and provocative. All posts will be reviewed by our editors and may be edited for clarity, length, and relevance.
We ask that you adhere to the following guidelines.
1. No selling of products or services.
2. No ad hominem attacks. These are conversations in which we debate ideas. Criticize ideas, not the people behind them.