Organisation Strategies in a downturn?

I was recently directed to an article suggesting that Trader Joes, MTV and iPod were all born during times of recession and if handled correctly a downturn can be a good thing for a company. The article went on to suggest that whilst everyone else may be turning their backs on advertising, companies should be advertising more.

I am not sure it is totally correct to suggest that if handled correctly a downturn can be a good thing for a company. Sounded a little too much like journalist spin and I aplogise for a my slight cynicism here. Whenever there is economic movement such as growth or recession, there are going to be winners as well as losers. The examples quoted of MTV, iPOD and Trader Joes may indeed be winners but the article failed to provide their subscribers a balanced point of view - just to make their case and press home their point. However to the point to which I think article should have been making, a recession does not necessarily mean a downturn in organizational fortune.

The article really referred to companies who have all rethought what VALUE means to their customers. An example here would be all the costly feature/functions that your products and services have that are not really used or appreciated but are there more to try to keep abreast of the competition. Look at your word processor for example, how much of the functionality do you actually use? Do you even know about all the features? I certainly don't but perhaps I am just a word processor novice!

The premise is rather than cut costs, companies should look to eliminate those 'costly' factors that the industry takes for granted but are not deemed valuable to their customers and improve or enhance those factors that are. This can mean thinking out of the box and applying creativity to problems and you may say 'Easier said than done', but still possible nonetheless. So instead of benchmarking your competitors, you actually bypass them.

Benchmarking can be dangerous if used on its own as it can lead to market convergence with typical 'me too' offerings. When I talk about features/functions I am talking about all dimensions of the product/service offering such as how customers engage and how they are serviced well beyond the sale -all aspects of a prospect's processes from learning to scoping to selection and beyond.

This then leads me to the most interesting observation about the whole article that came my way. Why should organisations wait for a recession to do this? Imagine if they adopted the same approach during growth? Isn't that what true market oriented versus product oriented companies really do?

And to the last point, about advertising more and bucking the trend whilst others are scaling back. If nothing else it can provide you with more relative more share of mind. However I think the decision to do this or not must depend more on what your advertising objectives are and will have to be set against wider organisational priorities in times of scarcity and uncertainty. As the saying goes, sometimes you should take what you read with a pinch of salt.