OUTLOOK & ANALYSIS

Bruce W. Marcus: What To Do in a Recession

Marcus, the reigning guru of professional services marketing, has a few tips for marketing into a recession. Well worth reading, remembering and using:

  1. There may be real opportunity in that competitors may be retrenching, which means that if you attack where competitors retreat, your normal marketing impact may be magnified.
  2. Refocus your marketing efforts to emphasis strategy. For example, if you’ve been concentrating on the catalogue of marketing tools, shift emphasis to market analysis and an abrupt strategy change. By demonstrating your ability to focus on markets for your firm’s services, you might bring management to better understand the firm’s markets. If you can do this effectively, you might get the firm to prune efforts in weaker services, and on weaker clients, and refocus on services and clients that give greater return on investment.
  3. Analyze the firm’s clientele in terms of the number of clients in each of the declining, static, and emerging industries. Focus strategies on prioritizing on clients and prospects in emerging industries, next on static of table industries, and least on companies and clients in declining industries. By designing programs in this context, you increase potential return on investment, and by making your total marketing efforts more effective, you even may save money.
  4. Without minimizing efforts to build name recognition and reputation, focus on demonstrating your firm’s professional capabilities. If you do this, the name recognition and reputation will emerge on their own.
  5. Minimize marketing efforts to sell the whole firm, and focus instead on individual practices. Again, focus on practices in which you have greater strength, or are in industries in which you have greater experience.
  6. Think target marketing. A well-devised direct mail program, for example, is not only effective but cost effective. Make a list of ten companies your firm would most like to have as clients, and hit them with a full follow-up program.
  7. Don’t worry too much on esoteric problems like firm differentiation. In professional services marketing, competition is won not by showing that your firm is better than their firm, but by demonstrating competence and superior performance industry by industry and practice by practice.

Full article at The Marcus Letter.


2 Responses to “Bruce W. Marcus: What To Do in a Recession”

  1. Kirk Ward

    Marcus,

    I would like to disagree with you where in your article you suggest not worrying about esoteric problems like differentiation.

    In times like these, nervous clients and prospects are going to be reassured with a firm’s expertise if they feel that the specialization and differentiation they see provides extra expertise in their needs niche.

    In other words, if I was in the restaurant business, I would feel more comfortable using a services provider who specializes in restaurants than I would in using a generalist with a more professional “image.”

    Because services are so hard to evaluate from the outside, I would feel that the specialist knows the nuances of my industry better, and can serve me better.

    Kirk Ward

  2. Adrienne

    Everyone compares what we are experiencing to the Great Depression but we’ve got one revolutionary tool no one in the 30s had… the internet. Thankfully it *is* revolutionizing the way people do business, and those who turn the tool into something exponentially more powerful through ingenuity will certainly make it through whatever we face…

    Thank you for posting some actual guru advice, it’s getting a little annoying seeing the “fly by night” gurus spewing “priceless” info on the internet ;)