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There is no doubt that we are in a recession and so this is a time for using our brains, not for ‘bracing’ ourselves for what might happen…or for indulging in the kind of ‘bravado’ that involves mindless expressions such as ‘what recession?’ The best way to face a recession is to imagine that it will always be there, offering continuous difficulty and serious challenges…which is precisely what professional sports people do. Think of any major sporting code and try to think when it ‘gets easy’, or less difficult. The opposite applies, and it is a normal way of thinking and operating in that demanding area of human life. Why should business be any different? And history shows that whenever sports teams or individual athletes have approached contests with anything less than a serious, respectful effort, they often get beaten by seemingly weaker opponents.

If business people learned to ‘look out’ at the markets they serve, so as to see where customers need real help, they would see and be motivated by views of potential that are massive…even during a recession. Additionally, ‘looking out’ at the market intelligently to see where we are needed, rather than lustfully to see where our next sale is coming from…will show that the primary need of the market is for motivation and ideas, not products. Don’t forget, the unspoken view of the market is this: ‘ideas make money, products cost money.’ The first idea needed by the market is how to ‘look out’ at their own potential, otherwise they will not be receptive to sales activity. Here is an example: while consulting for a company selling fragrances through pharmacy, I created a simple device called ‘measuring category growth potential’. To test the concept I visited a progressive chemist store in Sydney that had a sizable area devoted to merchandising prestige fragrances. I then talked briefly with individual customers in the store, and I asked them three questions: ‘do you buy fragrance products?’, ‘where do you buy the products?’, and ‘why do you buy the products from that outlet?’

Of the 20 or so customers I spoke to, almost all of them bought fragrance products on a regular basis, but only 20% were buying such products from the pharmacy! Bear in mind that these people were regular customers of the store, and yet they bought fragrance brands elsewhere…and their main reason was ‘habit’. The point is that these customers were representative of the pharmacy’s entire customer base, and they hardly knew that the store was a serious player in the area of fragrance products. The pharmacist was livid when she ‘looked’ at the results, however after her anger subsided she agreed to embark on a programme of continuously promoting the fragrance category to all of her customers.

When I ran the marketing and sales operations at Schwarzkopf, we ‘looked out’ at the salon market and discovered these critical facts: a) almost all clients of salons ‘needed’ a salon treatment service; b) less than 5% of these clients were actually sold a treatment service; c) the vast majority of salon owners did not know about facts a and b. This way of ‘looking out’ more intelligently at our market, helped us to create a more positive and creative ‘outlook’ for our sales of treatment products to salons. A key lesson here is that companies and individuals cannot simply go through each year ‘trying’ to lift sales over last year’s results. This involves an indulgent and unproductive marketing manner. At all times, what customers and prospects ‘need’ is improved results, and we must accept that the market is almost completely oblivious to this need! The market only knows what it ‘wants’ in products, and at times like this the want level for products and services (demand) always goes down.

The two main areas to ‘look out’ at are 1. Achieving a higher share of current ‘demand’ (as with the pharmacist), and 2. Creating demand for and with customers, even though no ‘want’ is on view, so as to help them achieve better results that they really ‘need’ (as with salons and their clients). When you build market intelligence this way, you control your own economy, rather than hoping for the best.