Mass media’s need to keep you tuned in has corrupted their integrity and honed their skills at pushing your buttons.

Turn on Fox news tonight and listen to Shepherd Smith’s Fox Report. His dramatic pauses have the power to make a two cent hike in the price of milk seem like a space shuttle has exploded. Or turn on CNBC and listen to Bob Pisani being interviewed from the NYSE trading floor. The most mundane facts are blurted out in the same panicked tone as the Hindenburg disaster. “Rumors are flying that the Feds may in fact slash long term interest rates as early as next month by a full half point … Oh, the humanity.”

I wrote a book about ten years ago entitled Media Hypnosis. The premise is that when people watch TV and read the paper, they slip into the alpha state of consciousness; 8-13 cycles per second as measured by an EEG — the same state hypnotists exploit to persuade people to stop smoking or lose weight. Like it or not, the media has you under its spell.

Whipping you into a frenzy is in the media’s best interest but could it be clouding your judgment on critical issues? If you have been duped into thinking the “economic crisis” is worse than it really is, are you making business decisions based on the rants of a bunch of knuckleheaded reporters trying desperately to drive ratings? Could it be that what is trumped as a dangerous “global financial meltdown” is nothing more that a normal symptom of a healthy free market correction? Of course that wouldn’t be very startling news, now would it? To some degree your perception of the bad economy has been jaded by an overzealous media and compounded by the phenomenon of media hypnosis. So what should you do? 

I’ve been in business for twenty years and have been through a number of down turns. It seems the world panics and freezes up for a couple months until people realize two things: 1. The world isn’t coming to an end, and 2. They can’t stop marketing.

Like investing, going against the herd can be a good marketing strategy. I’m not ignoring the fact that the economy is down, I’m just suggesting that maybe it’s not as bad as you think and that this could be an opportunity you can capitalize on.  There aren’t many good business lessons learned during good times. Here are a few lessons I’ve learned on the downside and how they have benefited me. You need to think this way to counter the media’s effect. 

1. Budget pressure makes you think deeper and come up with amazing ideas that will serve you for years to come. In the 80s the economy was in the tank. It looked like I might lose my job so I thought up the idea of selling publicity by the story rather than by the hour. I went to my boss and we become business partners. I bought him out some years ago. He made good money on the deal and, at least by my humble standards, the business has made me rich. Not a bad result.
2. When the competition panics and seizes up, it opens the door to reaching their customers and gain market share. I try to at least double my marketing in economic downturns and it’s worked so far.
3. Your position becomes more important in the company. When I was young I worked in the marketing department of a company that had four hundred employees. When hard economic times hit, the owner cut and slashed like crazy but he never quit marketing. In fact he increased it. I went from a nobody in the company to a trusted advisor. At the time, it made my career.
4. Tough times weed out weak competitors. Shoddy competitors are bad for everyone. Business is always more profitable when these goofballs and their lousy business practices are out of the picture. It’s motivating to think that out-marketing them in down times will facilitate that happening.
5. There are many societal opportunities that allow you to favorably position your brand. Last week we tried to book the Celedrin Tigerettes (an over-60 women’s basketball team) on a news station but the reporter wasn’t biting. We switched to a more societal angle and suggested that the Tigerettes take on their newscasters in a free throw competition and then donate basketballs to Toys for Tots. Both the client, Celedrin, and the news station loved the idea. This is an opportunity for societal positioning if you benefit from that.
6. It makes weak promotions easy to spot. Our event business has always sold sponsorships. When money is tight, some businesses rightfully consider sponsorships an unnecessary expense. We quickly altered the product to provide more bang for the buck and changed the name from sponsorship to a Marketing Partnership. I saw a signed contract come across my desk for $13,000 today. This change will make us money over the years and we would have never thought of it without downward pressure of the market.

 In good times and in bad, being in business is never about sitting on the sidelines.  

We sell a number of marketing services that can help you work your way through this recession. Take publicity for instance.We sell it per story that gets published. By charging per placement, you always get publicity for your money. When firms charge hourly, you are paying them to try. Of course, if you want to pay us by the hour we are happy to work that way but we have found that most clients love holding us accountable to produce.   

Another product of ours you should consider is our Ready Aim Marketing process. If you took marketing classes in college but can’t remember the concepts, Ready Aim Marketing will help tremendously. If you’ve never had formal training in marketing, you will be delighted with how these concepts bring clarity to your thinking.  Ready Aim Marketing is a concise, easy-to-understand series of workshops that cover the critical concepts of marketing. As the workshops progress, our staff writers populate the concepts with your company’s information and create a personalized Brand Playbook for you. Not only will it help bring clarity and control, it will help you discover the hot-buttons that cause consumers to purchase. Ready Aim Marketing is a critically important program every serious marketer should go through.   Here is what is included in the Ready Aim Marketing package:

• Reach & Teach Product Promotion: Teaching Consumers to Buy. This is a short book I’ve written that explains key marketing concepts. I designed this to help clients, my staff and students in my college classes (I teach for fun but mainly to force myself to internalize the concepts) cut through the clutter and form a concise understanding of the marketing communications process.
• A 24×36 full-color marketing poster/map I designed that visually illustrates key concepts in the marketing promotions process.
• A series of workshops, the first of which teaches key marketing terms and concepts. Subsequent meetings draw out your company, market and message information and apply them to those concepts.
• This process culminates with a personal Brand Playbook tailored specifically to your company and products. This glossy, four color, perfect bound book captures information about your strategy, the market, the message, and execution tactics. The Brand Playbook gets information out of people’s heads and into a shared document that synchronizes your strategy with everyone from staff to vendors. The Brand Playbook then acts like a lens though which all the marketing partners can create and evaluate promotions.

Once you institutionalize the concepts in this program, your marketing will immediately become more effective, resulting of course in increased sales.   

Another product we sell that you should consider is Web development. One of the first things customers do after they have gone through our Ready Aim Marketing program is walk over to our Web department and get a bid on redoing their website. The reason they want to switch companies and work with us is because I teach the marketing concepts in the Ready Aim Marketing program to all of my staff including our web programmers and designers.   

While other web design firms have smart programmers and talented designers, they aren’t as plugged into marketing as my staff is. So not only can we design a nice looking functional site, we build the site from a marketing perspective—and that can make all the difference in the world when it comes to connecting to customers and causing them to purchase.