A steady flow of thoughts about advertising
and marketing from True Creek.
Posted by truecreek on October 26, 2009 under The Work | 
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Couple of nice pages and a spread from some recent work Chris produced for an agency in Tampa, FL.
Posted by truecreek on October 14, 2009 under More Dam News, Research | Comments are off for this article
By eMarketer.
College students are the most connected demographic group in the US. They own multiple electronic devices and are a prime audience for online video.
eMarketer estimates 18.2 million college students, 95.7% of the total, will go online at least once a month in 2009. As Internet usage becomes ubiquitous, the percentage of students online is growing more slowly, rising to an estimated 96.8% in 2013.
“Not only is Internet access widely prevalent, but so is technology ownership in general,” said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, “College Students: Connecting with the Connected Crowd.” “Since students own multiple devices, they want to use those devices to interact with friends and information in multiple ways. They care less about what method they use for their interactions and more about how easy and seamless those interactions are.”
Students are heavy consumers of online video—but also regular TV. They use social networking Websites to stay in touch with their friends—but rely on text messaging as well. And smartphones, which are becoming more and more common on campus, give students the ability to do many activities without touching a computer at all.
Despite the fears of some industry-watchers, college students are not abandoning social networks now that the sites have caught on among their elders.
“So far, that is not happening,” said Ms. Williamson. “In fact, the opposite is true. Students are more likely than ever to use social network sites.”
EDUCAUSE, which has tracked social network usage on campus for the past several years, found that the percentage of students visiting sites such as Facebook or MySpace on a daily basis has more than doubled in the past three years, from 32.9% in 2006 to 66.2% in 2009.
“But other indicators bear watching,” cautions Ms. Williamson. “One is how often students visit social networks and how much time they spend there.”
Still, in May 2009 Youth Trends found that Facebook was the No. 3 source among college students for learning about new products and services, after word-of-mouth and television commercials. Social networks remain a viable venue for marketing to the college crowd.
Posted by truecreek on October 9, 2009 under More Dam News | Comments are off for this article
My wife has been complaining about this for years. Do you know a production house that does it?
By John Eggerton.
The House Communications Subcommittee has approved a bill that would require the broadcast and cable industries, which includes satellite and other multichannel video providers, to regularize the volume of advertisements and the programming surrounding them.
By a voice vote, the committee passed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, backed by Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), and referred it to the full Energy & Commerce Committee.
Eshoo said the bill premise was simple: “To make the volume of commercials and programming uniform so that spikes in volume do not affect the consumer’s ability to control sound.” Eshoo said that ad volume spikes had “endangered hearing for decades.” She also said legislative spouses had been urging their husbands or wives to sign on as co-sponsors. “I think they are all tired of getting blasted out of their easy chairs or off their exercise equipment due to these ridiculously loud commercials.”
Posted by truecreek on October 7, 2009 under More Dam News | Read the First Comment
Continuing the discussion about the change in consumer spending behavior….from today’s Washington Post.
By Nancy Trejos
The recession has cooled the American ardor for living on credit. After years of saying “Charge it,” consumers are more often paying with their debit cards instead.
Worry about jobs, fear of fluctuating interest rates on credit cards and wariness about spending too much are contributing to the change.
“People are managing their money in a different way,” said David Robertson, publisher of the Nilson Report, which tracks the credit card industry. “You clearly have a situation where those people who have jobs are exhibiting recession anxiety and they are making more debit transactions.”
Nine months ago, Alyson Chadwick, a public relations representative for a nonprofit organization on Capitol Hill, got a debit card with a MasterCard logo so she could use it anywhere for purchases. Carrying cash was unsafe, she thought, and a debit card would help her manage her spending better.
“I use my credit cards hardly at all,” she said. “I don’t even carry them with me.”
Trish Preston, head of U.S. debit for MasterCard, said the changing fortunes of debit and credit tell the story of how the recession has transformed consumer spending.
“Think about what’s happening in the economy,” she said. “Appliances, furniture, jewelry: Those are very sensitive to the economy, and those have generally been credit spending categories.”
Debit cards, meanwhile, tend to be used for routine necessities such as groceries and gasoline. “Those kinds of expenditures are happening,” she said.
The Federal Reserve said that revolving credit, primarily credit cards, dropped by $6.1 billion in July, or 8.1 percent on an annualized basis. Debit card usage, meanwhile, had been steadily growing over the years but has surged in this recession.
Credit cards draw on money borrowed at often high interest rates; debit cards withdraw money from the cardholder’s bank account.
Visa announced this spring that spending on Visa debit cards in the United States surpassed credit for the first time in the company’s history. In 2008, debit payment volume was $206 billion, compared with credit volume of $203 billion. MasterCard reported that for the first six months of this year, the volume of purchases on its debit cards increased 4.1 percent, to $160 billion, in the United States. Spending on credit and charge cards sank 14.8 percent, to $233 billion.
“Consumers are rational thinking individuals, and they’re going to shift their behavior in a way that fits with their current economic situation,” said Scott Strumello, an associate with the Auriemma Consulting Group, a Long Island-based payment card advisory firm. “They’re thinking more seriously about it, and many may decide, ‘I’m going to use debit where I can and reserve credit for larger purchases.’ ”
For three decades, credit cards, which emerged about 50 years ago but were not in widespread use until the 1970s, have reigned as the preferred mode of payment, mostly on big purchases, for baby boomers and their children. Before that, people used cash, bank loans or the installment plan.
Baby boomers typically charged responsibly. Their children, who grew up in the mostly prosperous 1980s and 1990s, became dependent on cards from an early age, partly because card issuers marketed heavily on college campuses. Unlike their parents, they tended to see credit cards as long-term loans. And they charged too much.
“An awful lot of kids grew up in a very big house and they grew up with pretty much everything they wanted, and then they became adults and their parents, rightly or wrongly, probably wrongly, conditioned them to a set of conditions they cannot afford,” said Lewis Mandell, professor of finance and business economics at the University of Washington and a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute.
Industry executives said much of the debit card growth is fueled by a growing disdain for carrying cash and writing checks. But they also acknowledged that credit cards have fallen out of favor with consumers who want to save more and limit their discretionary spending. In July, the personal savings rate reached 4.2 percent, up from about 1 percent of after-tax income early last year, according to government data.
“The real question is: Is consumer behavior permanent?” Strumello said. “And that’s something where the jury is still out. Consumers have made moves in other downturns.”
Mandell said the next generation might reject credit after seeing their parents struggle with money. “I think the next generation may be self-correcting depending on the duration and magnitude of the downturn,” he said.
There is some indication that the shift to debit is partly a visceral reaction to credit card industry practices in the past few months. Since a law was passed in May that will limit the industry’s ability to raise rates and fees, many issuers have cut credit lines and increased rates, forcing borrowers to look for other modes of payment.
Posted by truecreek on October 2, 2009 under The Work | Comments are off for this article
Very nice work from Glenn. Photography by Burgess Blevins.
Posted by truecreek on September 27, 2009 under The Work | Comments are off for this article
Strong piece of design from Kyle, a member of The Creekbed.
Posted by truecreek on September 25, 2009 under Opinions. Everyone has them., Research | Comments are off for this article
In a follow up to one of my earlier posts, research conducted by Hart Research Associates for Citi has shown that consumers in the U.S. have made what they are calling “permanent spending and savings changes” as a result of the current recession.
According to a tidbit in today’s edition of the USA Today, 63% percent of the people contacted by Hart stated emphatically that the way they handle their personal finances has been changed forever and only 29% plan on going back to the old way of doing things.
If this research proves out to be prophetic, and I believe it will, all marketers will have to hope they can get a piece of what will be a much smaller pie.
http://truecreek.com/2009/07/29/what-will-this-recession-teach-us/
Posted by truecreek on September 10, 2009 under More Dam News | Comments are off for this article
A smart idea by P&G.
By Laurie Burkitt
Justin Breton, a 21-year-old senior public relations major at Boston University, spends a lot of time talking about PUR, a water filtration system from Procter & Gamble.
Breton is among 100 college “ambassadors” P&G is paying to pitch the company’s brands–namely, PUR, TAG deodorant and Herbal Essences hair products–at 50 colleges and universities year-round. Through a program P&G calls ReadyU, these students create their own marketing plans for promoting the company’s products to fraternities, sports teams, and extra-curricular groups.
P&G pays the students to work 15 hours a week, meaning some kids can earn up to $2,500 a semester. (P&G will pay around $500,000 to kids before graduation next spring.) To make sure students are putting in their time on behalf of one or two brands they are assigned, P&G and RepNation, a unit of marketing outfit Mr. Youth, organize daily conference calls and require ambassadors–65% are women–to file reports every two weeks that include 25 pictures of their academic advertising attempts.
The ReadyU program is part of P&G’s move to dabble in new types of marketing, including online retailing and sports sponsorships. Now, at universities, it’s letting go of its tight grip on brand messaging and allowing students to craft pitches.
Mohammad I Sheikh, a senior studying advertising at the University of Texas at Austin, another PUR pitchman, says he spends up to 15 hours a week teaming with active campus groups that care about boosting water quality in developing countries. They plan to attend international student fairs and events near dorms, Sheikh says. Emily Kieczykowski, a junior majoring in business at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., says she passes out coupon books while walking from class to class. When football season is in full swing, Breton says he’s considering plugging TAG deodorant by holding a body odor contest to find the stinkiest college athletes.
“This was a big risk to put the branding power in someone else’s hands,” says P&G spokesman Glenn Williams, “but we know it’ll be successful.” While the Cincinnati company relinquishes some marketing control to students, it still requires them to execute corporate ideas. On freshmen move-in day, each of the schools’ ambassadors was asked to organize groups of movers to help hoist futons and boxes into rooms and pass out samples of PUR. Over Labor Day weekend, P&G required students to arrange free bus trips to Target, where students could buy P&G products with coupons they had been given.
P&G tested the program last year at three universities–University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Tennessee at Knoxville and the University of Texas at Austin–and decided to expand based on increased regional sales results, on which the company declined to disclose, and the creativity of the students. One Tide ambassador, for instance, held a campus mud battle and offered to wash dirty clothes (with Tide, of course) to anyone who participated.
To talk up PUR to BU students, Breton is organizing free concerts featuring popular campus musicians who will drink PUR-filtered water on stage and have samples on the sidelines for the audience. He works with one other ambassador on campus and meets with her a few days a week to hash out marketing ideas that they pitch daily to RepNation.
Still, pitching filtered water can be challenging, confides Breton. “It makes me wish I had gotten Tide as my brand,” he says.
Posted by truecreek on September 9, 2009 under More Dam News, Research | Comments are off for this article
By Julia Boorstin
Buying a magazine at a newsstand is quite the impulse purchase. These days you can get most magazine content online, for free, or at least something pretty comparable. And if you really want to flip through those glossy pages every week, but you’re looking to save money, a subscription saves as much as 90 percent off newsstand prices.
Needless to say it’s no surprise that newsstand magazine sales dropped 12 percent in the first half of the year compared to the first half of 2008; over the previous six month period that drop was 11 percent. While subscriptions did increase slightly, not enough to compensate for the decline at newsstands, and total circulation was down 1 percent for the period.
The decline in newsstand magazine purchases may be an indicator of consumer confidence – people are watching their discretionary spending – but I’d argue that newsstand magazine revenues are unlikely to recover when consumer spending does.
There are too many free, online options and people are getting increasingly accustomed to consuming content on their mobile devices and laptops. As content companies figure out how to distribute more content to your iPhone or cell phone people may not need to shell out $5 as frequently for their glossy fill of celebrity gossip and photos.
That’s not to say that the magazine business will go away. People will still buy magazines, they may just get used to this reduced magazine spending level we’re at now.
Of course magazines’ struggles with circulation come on top of the advertising decline that’s hit the entire print journalism business. Take a look at the magazines at the newsstand or in your mailbox this month. September is supposed to be a big month for ad sales, but you’ll notice that the magazines will be remarkably skinny. If they don’t fatten up by the end of the year we’re sure to see more magazines shut down. Last month Time Inc. stopped publishing “Southern Accents” magazine, jut the latest magazine closure in the home decor space where ad revenue has fallen more than 20 percent.
It’s not just the commercial magazine business that’s suffering, business-to-business magazine ad pages fell 30.15 percent in the first half of the year, compared to the year-earlier period, according to Business Information Network data. And the trends didn’t improve over that 6-month period. In June ad pages were down nearly 33 percent from the year-earlier month.
Posted by truecreek on September 8, 2009 under Opinions. Everyone has them. | Comments are off for this article
For years now, I have recommended to my clients that they invest in sports packages tied to their regional teams.
For example, if you have a medium-sized business in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida and the like and you have not considered running thirty second television with some SEC package available at your local station, you might be missing a great opportunity. Of course, it’s not perfect for every business, but it will work well for many businesses.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the demos for football are all male. Just not true. You will reach a very large and diverse audience with your buy.
Don’t worry that the season has started. The stations will prorate any type of package and there are still a bunch of them out there. Stations are hungry.
Take advantage of some pricing weakness and negotiate a great deal for yourself. Or call us and we’ll help you put it together for you.
Posted by truecreek on September 3, 2009 under More Dam News | Comments are off for this article
Ouch.
By Jenna Wortham, The New York Times
Slim and sleek as it is, the iPhone is really the Hummer of cellphones.
It’s a data guzzler. Owners use them like minicomputers, which they are, and use them a lot. Not only do iPhone owners download applications, stream music and videos and browse the Web at higher rates than the average smartphone user, but the average iPhone owner can also use 10 times the network capacity used by the average smartphone user. “They don’t even realize how much data they’re using,” said Gene Munster, a senior securities analyst with Piper Jaffray.
The result is dropped calls, spotty service, delayed text and voice messages and glacial download speeds as AT&T’s cellular network strains to meet the demand. Another result is outraged customers.
Posted by truecreek on September 1, 2009 under Opinions. Everyone has them. | Comments are off for this article
By Joseph Young
So are you a Marvel, or a Disney? The more and more I think about it, I’m a Marvel guy. Just can’t get enough of Iron Man. My wife Lin, is a Disney, without a doubt.
The acquisition of Marvel Entertainment by The Walt Disney Company was announced yesterday to great fanfare. It was just all over the map. You have to congratulate the PR folks. The whole introduction was very well done.
To think: the amount of collective creative talent that will be put in place upon the completion of this deal will be just incredible.
But is the deal weak? From today’s news, consider this:
Add to that, Sony and News Corp maintain their rights in perpetuity unless they fail to make more movies.
If these terms are true, that’s a BIG ouch to me. This can’t all be about merchandising, theme park rides and retail store locations, can it?
UPDATE: It looks like the comment above just might be true. According to BusinessWeek, Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger has stated that the deal is all about Marvel’s 5,000 plus characters, combined with Disney’s success with consumer products, theme parks and rights and license fees. The movies are going to have to wait.
Posted by truecreek on August 28, 2009 under Opinions. Everyone has them. | Comments are off for this article
Great article from Milan Martin. He speaks of the truth. If cultures don’t mesh well, it’s going to be a challenging creative business relationship. Been there and done that.
By Milan Martin
For the past several months, we’ve been in the throes of a pitch. A big pitch. We really wanted to work with this client, so we threw ourselves into it. Multiple creative teams across several offices, customer focus groups, brand videos — the whole nine yards.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned about pitching over the years it’s that you absolutely have to show your true colors. With this pitch, we went to great lengths to give these prospective clients a taste of what life would really be like for them if they chose us.
When they visited our agency, did we take them to Chez Francois for lunch? No. We had Shake Shack brought in. Double cheeseburgers, black-and-white shakes and fries. On paper plates. Because that’s us. We’re burger-eating, jeans-wearing, show-you-an-idea-even-if-it’s-not-completely-baked-yet kind of people. And that doesn’t work for everyone.
Misrepresenting your agency culture or your personality in a pitch would be like convincing a beautiful girl to marry you based on your common love for Michael Bolton. You may have won her hand, but you’ve got a lifetime of Michael Bolton ahead of you. And if you weren’t a Michael Bolton fan to begin with, the thrill of “victory” will soon fade with each rendition of “When a Man Loves a Woman.”
On the same token, we asked as much from them. How do you see agencies in the context of your marketing organization? What would your current agency say about you? Talk to us about how you like to work. SHOW us a day in the life!
So throughout the pitch process, we made several visits to this prospect’s corporate headquarters. It was a nice building in a corporate park in suburban New Jersey. At first glance, nothing out of the ordinary. But each time we drove into the parking lot we noticed something strange: large groups of people in business suits walking in gang-style through the parking lot, some engaged in gregarious conversation with each other, some more stoically focused on some unknown mission.
We never really said anything to each other about it, but each of us, we later found out, was trying to imagine where these people were walking to. To us city folk, we can’t imagine not having at least two Starbucks within a half-block walk, so maybe these poor suburbanites were walking to the closest Starbucks, three miles down the road. Or were they on a “Blues Brothers”-style mission from God?
The big pitch day came and went. Two questions rested heavy on our minds. Did we do everything we could to win? And where the hell were all those people in the parking lot going?
Well, we won the business, and in our first, much more casual, immersion meeting with these great, shiny, new clients, they opened the floor to us for questions. At this point, one of our account guys raised his hand with a furrowed brow. “Here we go,” I’m anticipating, “a smart question, maybe about the detail behind their segmentation or their CRM program.”
“So, uh, yeah. Where are all the people in the parking lot walking to?”
Keep in mind, the contract’s not even signed at this point, so for a brief moment in time I was a little worried our first question of this newly christened relationship wasn’t more … strategic.
“Where do you think they’re going?” the head client responded with a grin.
(“Don’t say mission from God. … Don’t say mission from God.”)
After a minute or two of us awkwardly trying to guess, they finally revealed that it was simply a part of their corporate culture. They drive to and from work, have desk jobs and work long hours — this just gets their heart rates up for a few minutes a day.
Logical enough.
As luck would have it, just then our new clients realized that this was their team’s scheduled “walk” time. “You want to see our culture, do you?” the head client offered. So off we went. Walking. Around the parking lot. In 91-degree heat.
And you know what? It was an amazing way to get to know each other, cut through the formality established by the oak in the conference room and have a “date” out of school. One last chance — for both parties — to “speak now or forever hold their peace” (or at least for the length of the contact).
Fortunately, we don’t mind getting a little sweaty. But if we were the type of people that were worried about staining our Louis Vuitton shirts or scuffing our Prada shoes (we’re more Gap kind of people), we wouldn’t exactly fit within their culture.
They invited us into their culture. And we fit into theirs the way they fit into ours (they’re big fans of Shake Shack).
Since then, each time we’ve visited, there’s been time allotted on the agenda for a “walk around the parking lot.”
And so far, it’s a very happy client-agency relationship.
Now, you’ll no doubt ask: “If you had won the business and in that pre-contract meeting found out that you had nothing in common and didn’t really like each other, would your agency have walked away from the deal?”
Maybe, maybe not. I guess it would depend on the severity of the culture riff. But what I will say is that if you’re looking to establish deep, long-standing relationships with your clients, sharing your culture, honestly and openly, in the courting process is critical.
Otherwise, you may be in for a whole lot of Michael Bolton. And nobody wants that.
Posted by truecreek on August 17, 2009 under More Dam News | Comments are off for this article
Nice concept. Excellent execution.
Posted by truecreek on August 4, 2009 under More Dam News | Read the First Comment
From Popsop.com
Miller Russia has announced the winners of contest called “Create Your Future”. The aim was to choose the best design from 500 submitted works which will be printed on the new collectible cans series this year. From 30 short-listed works just 3 were chosen by online voting.
The authors of the best projects will get $5000, $3000 and $1000 accordingly.
Unfortunately, the design that took the most number of votes is too similar to the first collectible Miller can, that’s why the jury will choose a new design concept from the 30 final designs. And author of that design will also get a cash prize $5000.
Posted by truecreek on under More Dam News | Comments are off for this article
We’ve posted about this before, but this strong article by Anne Mai Bertelsen really drives home the the point that it is short-sighted to shift too much of your ad budget to the web if you are looking to reach baby boomers. They just have not adopted these mediums as quickly as younger audiences have.
By Anne Mai Bertelsen.
Earlier this year, Forrester Research released its five year advertising forecast which found that marketers were shifting substantial advertising dollars out of traditional media and into interactive channels such as mobile marketing, display ads, search, social media and email.
Yet, marketers who rely too heavily on interactive channels, at the expense of traditional channels, risk losing out on the lucrative Boomer segment that are avid multi-media consumers. In fact, unlike other age groups, Boomers consume a daily, balanced diet of media from multiple traditional and interactive sources with traditional media — television, radio, and newspapers — providing their daily “squares.”
While the media has been focused on reporting the demise of traditional media, Boomers have largely been ignoring their prognosticators and continue to use these mediums as their “go to” sources for entertainment, news and exposure to brands.
Consider these statistics:
Television
* Boomers spend, on average, 9.5 hours a day on “screen” time activities — e.g., television, computer, mobile phones, video games — with the largest percentage of time spent on television.
* 77% of Boomer’s daily viewing occurs between 7:30 pm and 11 pm, when they are most likely to watch The Discovery Channel, A&E, the Food Network, ESPN and Fox News.
Radio
* 76% listen to the radio — more than any other demographic — with half listening during morning drive-time and their programming preferences vary from oldies to country to talk shows.
* Time spent on print (e.g., newspapers, magazines, books) is highest among Boomers, with younger Boomers (45-54) spending on average 30 minutes a day and older Boomers (55-65) spending up to 100 minutes a day.
* In addition to national papers, 57% read their local daily newspaper regularly and 68% read their weekly community paper.
These traditional sources provide the foundation of Boomers’ awareness and knowledge of brands. They augment their daily traditional media consumption with time online, spending on average two hours a day.
But unlike other age groups, Boomers — who according to The Pew Internet and American Life Project now account for 35% of all Americans online — use the Internet much more heavily to research and purchase products and connect with friends and family than their younger peers. Typically, traditional advertising triggered their online search.
And, Boomers are researching products and services online because their brand loyalty is up for grabs; they are not brand loyal. Refuting a popular marketing truism that older consumers become more brand loyal, a 2008 AARP/Focalyst study found that 61% of Boomers felt “it didn’t pay to be brand loyal.”
A more recent Nielsen analysis of brand spending corroborated that finding: in March 2009, Nielsen reported that only a fifth of Boomers were more brand loyal than their younger cohorts.
As those who target Boomers well know, this segment offers an incredibly wealthy opportunity for marketers:
* 78 million+ members
* Estimated $10 trillion in discretionary assets – transferred to them by their dying parents and grandparents
* $2.3 trillion annual average spend on consumer goods and services
But, only if marketers shift some of their advertising dollars back to traditional media, creating an integrated media plan, to engage Boomers.
Posted by truecreek on July 30, 2009 under More Dam News | Read the First Comment
by Chris Shunk on Jul 30th 2009 at 4:29PM
When the government’s Cash for Clunkers program returned 4,026 orders on its first full day of availability, some were surprised by the speed with which the sales booster took off. After only five days, the program seems to have picked up steam rather than lost it: 22,782 trade-ins have funneled through dealer lots in the 3-4 days since Monday when the program began. So far, dealers have requested $95.9 million in reimbursement money from the government, or about 10% of the funds that were supposed to keep the program running into November. The cars.gov website currently shows $75 million left for CAT3 trucks and $779 million out of $1 billion for everything else.
So far, the average rebate value is reportedly $4,209, which means most customers are eligible for the $4,500 voucher that requires a new vehicle purchase with a 10+ mpg improvement verses the model being traded in. Tuesday was the busiest day so far, with $51 million worth of reimbursements filed by dealers, and there were $27 million filed on Wednesday.
The National Automotive Dealers Association says the program will likely run out of money well before the November deadline. If C4C continues at its current pace, the program could end as early as September. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Association, some 23,000 dealers have submitted registrations and 19,328 have been approved.
Posted by truecreek on July 29, 2009 under More Dam News | Comments are off for this article
You just have to love Scandinavian design.
From Popsop:
Heineken company an the Dutch design studio Tjep have opened in the centre of Amsterdam the first branded Heineken store.
It is divided into 4 sections: the fashion store with the branded designer clothes, state-of-the-art beer shop with a “Fridge” exposition, small recording studio for young talanted musicians, and a travel section where Heineken fans can give the tickets for branded sponsored events.
The general idea of the interior design is to express coolness and freshness which light Heineken beer brings to drinkers.
Posted by truecreek on under Opinions. Everyone has them. | Comments are off for this article
The Great Depression, by far the biggest economic downturn of the 21st century, taught an entire generation of Americans a horrible, yet valuable lesson. After Black Tuesday, when the stock market totally collapsed, life for many of these people would never be the same.
Jobs were gone overnight. Banks failed. Entire industries were devastated. Commodity prices plunged, taking with them so many family farms. Tent cities sprung up all around our nation. Life had never been harder.
As a nation, the shock to our collective system was so severe that our grandfathers and grandmothers became cynics. No one trusted the banking system. People started hoarding cash, hiding it anywhere they could. We became a nation of savers, simply because we didn’t want to expose our families to a repeat of the disaster.
And they never forgot.
The same shift in our financial psychology is happening again. After seeing their collective portfolios dive 40 to 50%, people are now on the sidelines, watching the market, willing to accept next to nothing in return simply because they are afraid to lose even more.
Savings rates have increased by ten fold, according to some statistics. Six fold at the very least. Consumer’s behavior has changed and in my opinion, for good.
My clients are seeing this firsthand. We are too. Financial conservation is back in vogue. The average homeowner is doing everything they can to clean up their household balance sheets. This popular frugality has permeated virtually all segments of our population, from the poor to the very wealthy.
And we are learning a lesson we will never forget. Just like they did back in the 1930s.
For those who think that we will bounce right back to the ways we did things before this hard recession started, think again. We are witnessing a sea change in the way the consumer deals with the economic realities at hand.
I find it very hard to believe that those lessons will be quickly forgotten.
Posted by truecreek on July 20, 2009 under Opinions. Everyone has them. | Comments are off for this article
By Seth Godin.
The bike shop is busy in June. If you bring your bike in for a tune up, it will cost $39 and take a week.
A week!
What if someone says, “I have a bike trip coming up in three days, can you do it by then?”
At most bike shops, the answer is a shrug, followed by, “I’m sorry, we’re swamped.”
The problem with telling people to go away is that they go away. And the problem with treating all customers the same is that customers aren’t the same. They’re different and they demand to be treated (and are often willing to pay) differently.
So, why not smile and say, “Oh, wow, that’s a rush. We can do it, but it’s expensive. It’ll cost you $90. I know that’s a lot, but there you go.”
Outcome: Maybe they’ll still leave. But maybe they’ll happily pay you for the privilege of doing business with you. Why should this be your choice, not theirs?
If you do tax accounting for mid-size businesses, why not offer a special last-minute service? A service in which you process shoeboxes filled with unsorted papers? A service that costs less but happens during your slow season?
There are two really good reasons to turn down special requests:
1. Because you’re marketing yourself as extremely busy and perfectly willing to turn down good work.
2. Because you want to market yourself as someone who is a rigid artist, a stick in the mud or a crotchety perfectionist. This works great for pizza places.