Winning Market Share in a Recession with Trade Shows

I came across this from Wayne Hurlbert on his Blog Business World way back in 2007 and it should give everyone pause for consideration:

“Should there be an economic downturn, the prudent course of action is to see an opportunity where everyone else sees a crisis. One of those expansion opportunities is through increased market share.

While other business owners and managers enter into a contraction and retrenchment mode during a recession, the contrarian business person thinks in terms of expansion. When other businesses cut back on marketing and advertising, they are surrendering potential market share. There is no better opportunity to pick up new customers and increase your company’s profile in the marketplace. When other organizations are cutting back, it’s time to claim their abandoned market share.”

When recession starts to bite, companies that tend to navigate the hard business climate through to the recovery successfully are good at several things.They focus on what they do well and keep doing it while at the same time they perceive an opportunity in hard business times when the competition is seeing shrinking margins and implementing cutback after cutback.

The knee jerk reaction of your competitors frequently leaves large areas of the market unattended and though the overall economic situation may be bad, you will find isolated opportunities where the withdrawal of your competitors has left potential customers ripe for the picking.

Professor John Quelch of Harvard Business School also had this to say last week in a post on September 24, 2008 -“How to Market in a Recession”:

“3. Maintain marketing spending. This is not the time to cut advertising. It is well documented that brands that increase advertising during a recession, when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and return on investment at lower cost than during good economic times….”

Review your marketing strategy but this is not the time to cutback on advertising and marketing campaigns.Particularly look at your trade show schedule and consider what cost savings you can make – this is always a good exercise no matter what the economic circumstances – but remember trade shows do work; they make money and they make profit so cutting back on them is not saving you cost it is costing you profit.

The key lesson with marketing in a recession is to cut costs while improving your contact with the market.

Many competitors are right now, giving ground as they retrench and cutback; this is valuable market share that is up for grabs for those businesses prepared, willing and able to go out and speak to these customers.When the ensuing recovery takes place (and the history of every recession is that there is a recovery) cost cutting with improved market contact will translate into a stronger and more profitable business relative to the competition.

Now consider whether trade shows have been working for you – if they do, now is the time to continue not cutback on your exhibition scheduling.There are things you can consider in terms of cutting the cost;

• Reduce the amount of space you rent;
• Reduce the level of staff manning the stand;
• Improve your marketing communications regarding your attendance at the trade show and maintain booth visitors;
• Improve your contact management system and ensure you maximize the potential from all leads and prospects generated at the trade show;
• Consider sharing space with a related but non-competing exhibitor;

Apply yourself and you will come up with a few others that are specific to your business but the guiding criteria on whether to cut the cost or not should be whether losing the cost will lose your access to market share or not.

You can do a great deal on a budget but the most important aspect of this exercise is to ensure that you maintain and indeed, enhance your contact and communications with the market.Sales is the lifeblood of any business and an aggressive sales and marketing campaign which brings your company to the attention of prospects again and again is going to ensure you gain market share and improve your realized trade show potential.

If you are in the B2B market, continuing your trade show schedule will be essential.If you cutback this sends out a message to all of your competitors and more importantly your customers who will expect you to have a presence.In this respect, trade show exhibiting is something of a business addiction in that attending is really about credibility as well as company promotion and sales.

Using a trade show as your own business performance barometer is also an extremely useful aspect of continuing trade show attendance.You will not get a better opportunity to talk to your competitors and assess how well they are performing than under the single roof of a trade show.Even if you cut back on the actual booth cost and space rental, you should still attend trade shows in order to fly the company flag and you will still be able to enjoy the business networking opportunities that exist on the floor.

Now the politicians may not like us using the “R” word at least not until we have gotten through it and they can then claim to have “solved” it, but we are facing very uncertain and extremely hard financial and economic times.The Wall Street financial collapse has become a Main Street crisis even with the huge $700 billion bail out but if you look carefully, you will see big money is already making investments in those stocks and industries which they perceive to be undervalued; Warren Buffett has invested $5 billion in the last few weeks even with the huge stock market falls.

Now is the time and the opportunity to go forward and seize market share left abandoned by your competition but you must control costs without losing your own customers and prospects in the process.Remember, review your trade show marketing and cut those costs where you can but with trade show exhibiting, you risk cutting the profit from your bottom line if you are cavalier in cutting costs.