Recession Survival

Well the third week in January will go down in the history books for a number of reasons.

Monday saw the second bank bailouts and the worst results ever from a UK Bank.

Tuesday saw the inauguration of President Obama, and by Friday we were officially in Recession with the papers starting to ask on Saturday if it was actually a depression.

As President Obama said in his Inaugural Address, "the ground has shifted" under the old ways of thinking. Only time will tell if he is right.

Of course there are still plenty of old codgers around, like me, who remember the last recession and perish the thought, the three day week, and the Prices and Income Board!

The world has however moved on and the Internet has changed many things.

I remember in 1995 getting very excited when our friends at Microsoft finally woke up to the potential of the net. I also remember running around telling anybody that would listen to me that one day every business would have a web site, www would be ubiquitous and we would see website addresses printed on jam jars etc.

Well all that happened and more, IT has empowered the consumer in ways that many of us never envisaged. Consumers now “buy” and we have all lost the art of “selling”.

For a decade you have not needed to sell, just a web site and somebody would find it and buy your products or services.

In hard times people, consumers, are going to have to be sold to!

Our government will have to learn that lesson. Just doing something is not enough we all need to understand what they are doing and why, and more importantly what it means to us. Spinning is not the same as selling.

Those of us in business will have to start thinking about how we sell our goods and services rather than just stacking them high and waiting for the consumer to buy.

I have to admit I get really annoyed by the television adverts for double discount sales, and the supermarket offers of  3 for the price of two etc.

The only conclusion I can come to is that if you can afford to discount that deeply now, then you were ripping me off before!

One of the problems of course is that we all know the price of everything, just google it if you are not sure, but what is it worth?

The marketers, and web designers have had their turn, now we need some good old fashioned sales people and I don’t mean the ones selling snake oil for the banks!