Beat the Recession with Your Advertising

Notice And Engage “The Smaller Is Better” Crowd

The 1980's and 1990's were times where bigger was better. Bigger houses, bigger salaries, and bigger cars were the products of choice in the marketplace with excess money to spend. This decade is when many made the choice to come back to more compact lifestyles, whether by choice or through conscience. If you are in a luxury market, you will have to start to engage a different set of values and modify your inventory to take into account less discretionary income in your customers’ pockets.

Trading Down In Size, Not Quality

Even so, Americans are still consumers with very refined tastes. You may find people are being forced to reduce their lattes at Starbucks to once a week, rather than every day. You may find that someone opts to downsize to a town home, but the quality will still be on the higher end. The point is that these consumers are going to make choices to make do with less square footage, but won't be as easily persuaded to give up the quality they've come to expect. That's one habit that will take severe economic distress to break. Once that happens, it's possible they won't even be able to afford to purchase a substitute, so they aren’t in your demographics anyways.

Advertise Quality And Value

For these consumers, they want to go with some of the same products and brands they've come to know and love. They just may not want to buy it in the same quantity or size until the economy improves. There's a couple of ways you can persuade them to still let go of their dollars. You can offer value packages with more product and offer discount volume pricing to persuade them to close the sale. Another strategy is to just create smaller packages that allow the consumer to buy less over a longer period of time.

Trying To Target What Your Consumers Want

The only way to find out which option is better is to have a campaign that targets the two different strategies. You can promote the value package and see how well it performs; if it fails to make a sale, then show them the smaller version, less pricey option. Or you can introduce the smaller item first; if they are willing to purchase, offer them a volume discount for buying the bundled package instead. Either way, you are trying to give the customer choices to either downsize or get a better price for buying more. To learn more just follow the link below.

http://www.mattmare.com/recession

Carpe Diem - Sieze the day!

Matt Maré
Founder of CapturePros.com