Are your products and marketing nimble enough to react to sudden changes in your market?
City staff surprised me last week with how quickly their team responded to the teachers’ strike. By Friday lunchtime, they had distributed information about their special day camps at the Recreation Complex – only 36 hours after the teacher’s union issued strike notice. I first heard about the complex’s programs through an email from the school, then my kids came home with a flyer. Radio spots soon followed. The Complex had quickly reacted to a new market (hundreds of students with nowhere to go on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday). Equally as important, they marketed it well – hitting their market directly.
Today, the school sent out another email blast, this time from Skylight Art Studio, offering Art Camps on Tuesday and Wednesday. Not quite as fast as the Complex, but still pretty fast!
Now, you may not have the inside track to have the schools sending out newsletters for you. But do you have marketing in place that can react quickly? Can you update your website on a moment’s notice? Is your Facebook page current with your current offerings? The marketplace can change quickly; can you react to it?
Friendly change: Marketers know that when people are forced to change their habits, they’re most likely to go with something a bit familiar. So if your competitor was to disappear tomorrow, would their customers switch to you, or someone else? Branding is key to success in times of change. And (here’s the plug for PR Living, of course) magazines are a particularly important part of long-term branding strategies. The Rec Complex will do better with their programs during the strike than most anyone else, in large part because their brand is well established and they continuously work to maintain that brand. People know it and are comfortable with it. How well established is your brand?
