When economic times are rough, the temptation is to panic beneath the impression businesses everywhere are failing; true enough, it’s hard not to when even Google is said to be preparing layoffs. But smart companies come through these things by trimming fat, making sure their columns add up, paying attention to market forces and trends, and playing their strengths.
In short, now is not the time to stop business, or marketing, or advertising; it’s time to be very precise and conscious of what your company is doing and how it is doing it. Online businesses, though not immune, do seem to have a natural insulation thanks to lower overhead. Currently, at least, they have some things in their favor: the economy is not going to cancel Christmas; consumers aren’t going to stop shopping, but they are going to be more selective about where they spend money; and now is the perfect opportunity to become a viable alternative.
Sell refurbished electronics, used furniture, consignment items? Guess who’s suddenly in demand when times are lean? The temptation may be cut promotion and hunker down until the storm is over, but when everybody’s looking for a deal, is there a better time to be the one providing that deal?
The Google Retail Team’s Julia Tang began her post about a periodic shopping benchmark—before and after presidential elections—all other general indicators sounded bleak. But when she dug into online retail activity and compared the data to 2004, the situation seemed remarkably copasetic. Granted, 2008 shopping search activity was down in the days leading up to the election—people seemed to be holding off to see what would happen. But post-election activity reached the same level as 2004.
And then the DOW crashed again, jarring confidence, before the upswing returned over the weekend. Things are uncertain, certainly, but not irrecoverable. Tang cited J Crew as a retailer benefiting by paying close attention to developments that could be capitalized upon, especially their tremendous luck of being mentioned by Michelle Obama. J Crew didn’t waste any time creating a Michelle Obama-targeted search page and special landing page.
Tang rightly suggests other online retailers be as proactive about their campaigns as possible. “So whether your top holiday goals are to drive online conversions or in-store sales, take advantage of the flexibility and immediacy of online to be innovative with your advertising, from changing your ad text, to strategic keyword buys, to adjusting your bids and even landing pages.”
Indeed, unless you’re too big to fail—what a nice luxury, huh?—you’ll need to fight to avoid being a casualty of the market corrections are that good enough for the rest of us.
