By Francis Moran
It’s been an interesting spring and summer here at inmedia.
The global economic downturn undoubtedly had its impact on us. Although we are headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, we have not been an Ottawa agency for a long time now. Over the past few years, we have worked for clients in Kelowna, Calgary, Toronto, Montréal, Halifax, Fredericton, Moncton and St. John’s. Outside Canada, for many years we have had a substantial footprint in Scotland, where we have clients in Glasgow and Livingston, and we have worked for clients in Farnborough and London in England. In the U.S., we’ve had clients in Boston, Jersey City, Chicago, San Jose and Phoenix.
Based on this extensive geographic diversification, we thought we might be able to better weather the economic storms that began to rage last year.
We were wrong.
Though our clients might be almost everywhere, they are, in the main, selling into just one market — the U.S. enterprise. And that market is a very badly wounded beast that is only now, and very tentatively, beginning to get back on its feet. As our clients cancelled or delayed programs, their spending with us fell and we found ourselves once again in an adjustment mode that, after nearly 11 years as a technology-focused public relations boutique, is not unfamiliar territory to us.
Our response was three-fold.
First, we’ve gone virtual. We’ve put our servers and shared resources in the cloud, locked the office doors for good and given back the key. With clients all over two continents, we’ve essentially been virtual to most of them anyway. We believe it makes us the kind of agile and responsive service offering this new economy demands.
Second, we focused our PR business development efforts on opportunities where we believed we would be given a real chance to demonstrate our differentiation. This has paid outstanding dividends, with four new clients engaging with us over the past 60 days. Two others have renewed their programs, and two more that had reduced programs are again spending a bit more with us, albeit on an ad-hoc basis as they continue to sharply evaluate every dollar and pound. And our pipeline is fairly robust.
Third, and most critically, we also began to focus on areas where our unique capabilities would gain us higher-value work. Public relations is a terribly commodified business, and the buyers of PR-agency services are still too-often wedded to ancient notions to which our approach simply fails to pay homage.
(This is not a universal truth, let me hasten to add. Our most recent account win saw us triumph over three U.S. boutique agencies and a large and experienced agency with extensive feet on the street on both sides of the Atlantic. The final round, between us and the big guys, offered the client a sharply differentiated choice, I believe. Entirely to their credit, they gave us every chance to show them a clear foretaste of what they would experience if they hired us, and they obviously liked what we showed them. Far too often, however, we never even get the chance to show how we’re different, or the prospect simply fails to grasp how that difference might change the PR agency game in their favour.)
In addition to this long-standing commodification of PR, the economic downturn has created a new class of competitors and made all existing competitors even hungrier. There are now legions of one-person PR shops staffed by perfectly competent former agency and client-side types whose practically non-existent overhead and sometimes-lifestyle approach to business make it impossible to compete. At the other end of the scale, we have bowed out of agency-selection processes where large multinational agencies were offering more services at a lower cost than we could manage as they struggled to at least cover their infrastructure costs.
It’s enough to make any wise business person look to new opportunities, and we have, with considerable early success.
So where are we going? We will continue to seek out high-value PR opportunities where our value proposition as a small but very senior band of sharply focused players with global capabilities can compete. But we’ll also look for opportunities to work with clients on a more strategic level, where the broader marketing and even business decisions get sorted. Although much of the last 10 years has been about guiding technology companies through the specific challenges of harnessing media and analyst coverage, we have a broader and more strategic pedigree that we’re keen to put to work.
In short, we bring technology to market. Stay tuned for more on this as we renew our commitment to this blog.
By Francis Moran
There is something startlingly disordered in the universe when I find myself on the same side of an issue as the Globe and Mail’s irrascible and generally annoying Christie Blatchford and, even worse, Kory Teneycke, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s spokesperson. And yet that is the quite foreign place in which I find myself today with regard to the unguarded comments by Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt that surfaced this week thanks to the sloppiness of Raitt’s communications director, whose inability to keep track of her belongings makes my teenagers look downright responsible.
This is not a political blog; if it was, I’d be rhapsodizing this morning about my old pal Darrell Dexter’s extraordinary victory in leading the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party to victory in yesterday’s general election in that province. But as a former political reporter in Halifax, let me take a moment to congratulate Darrell and his team for achieving something a generation or two of progressives in Nova Scotia despaired they’d ever see. It’s a whole new day in Nova Scotian politics.
No, this is a blog that concerns itself with technology and the marketing of technology. So how the heck does that intersect with Minister Raitt’s frank and open conversation that was inadvertently recorded and then released into the unwilling hands of a Halifax Chronicle Herald reporter? And, more to the point, how does this put me unexpectedly in the company of the likes of Blatchford and Teneycke?
Easy. Minister Raitt’s most controversial utterance was the word “sexy,” which is how she characterised the issue that the supply of medical radioistopes used in a broad range of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures is rapidly dwindling in this country thanks to a spill of radioactive heavy water that has shut down the reactor in Chalk River, Ontario, that provides the lion’s share of the world’s requirement for these most perishable of commodities. Any fair and reasonable reading of her comments — only a handful of words from more than five hours of an accidental recording have attracted any attention — would conclude that Raitt was not calling cancer or the isotope shortage sexy but, rather, stating it for what it was, an issue that was attracting a lot of media attention because it had the elements “radioactive” and “cancer” associated with it. This was Teneycke’s wholly reasonable take on the issue when I heard him interviewed on CBC yesterday morning.
The whole so-called “Raitt-gate” is a sorry symptom of how our media and politicians go for the cheap and easy when a more nuanced and sophisticated analysis is called for.
The Great Canadian Isotope Crisis of 2009 has its genesis in the very expensive failure of an imaginative and technologically advanced initiative launched by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, which operates the NRU reactor that is currently the main source for medical radioisotopes in Canada, and Ottawa’s MDS Nordion, which processes the raw isotopes into the compounds used by hospitals and clinics around the world to diagnose and treat a range of cancer, cardiac and other conditions. AECL practically invented the modern era of nuclear medicine and MDS Nordion, which was spun out of AECL in 1991, is still the world’s leader in the field.
Recognising that the aging and increasingly unreliable NRU was causing its customers to be uncomfortable about the security of supply of a perishable commodity that sees half its volume disappear in just hours or days through radioactive decay, MDS Nordion contracted with AECL to design and build a pair of reactors that would be the very first in the world exclusively devoted to the production of medical radioisotopes. Unfortunately, something went wrong on the way to full commissioning of the new reactors, dubbed MAPLE 1 and 2, and the project was essentially abandoned by MDS Nordion and mothballed by AECL.
Without the MAPLE reactors or some other new and reliable way of manufacturing radioisotopes, this crisis is merely the first of many — the second if you count the dustup in late 2007 and early 2008 that saw the Harper government fire the head of the Canada Nuclear Safety Commission because she was refusing to let AECL restart the NRU until a couple of CNSC requirements were met — that will inevitably become a permanent situation when the NRU becomes so old and unreliable that it must be decommissioned.
The real issue here, then, is how Canada is allowing its world-beating advantage in nuclear medicine slip away through turf wars and political hay-making. Rather than ask the tough questions about why MAPLE was abandoned and where the heck MDS Nordion is going to source its isotopes when NRU goes dark for good, the brains on both sides of the House of Commons and in the press galleries overlooking the House would rather focus on the simple. In short, they’d rather drive a minister to a tearful apology than figure out how to prevent Canada from losing one of the Avro Arrows of this age.
It’s enough to make anyone weep.
(Full disclosure: MDS Nordion was a PR client of mine in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and again a few years ago when one of my assignments was to develop the never-implemented communications strategy for the official opening of the MAPLE reactors. I’m pretty sure I have not abrogated any non-disclosure obligations here as I confirmed that all the details in this post can be found in publicly available documents.)
By Francis Moran
I was interviewed a few weeks back by the Ottawa Business Journal for a piece on marketing through a downturn. While a good bit of what I had to say did make it into the article, I thought it would be useful to expand on my thinking here. So, here are my 10 tips for marketing through a downturn.
1. Do as much marketing as you can afford
We’ve written a lot about the merit of maintaining your marketing spend through an economic downturn. There is still business to be written, markets to be taken and customers to be won. And a downturn, when many of your competitors may well be going quiet, often represents an unprecedented opportunity to grab a much larger share of voice.
2. Recalibrate your strategy and recast your budget strategically as opposed to simply cutting x% across the board
The OBJ reporter kept trying to get me to name the “one thing” that companies should do in response to a downturn. I resisted being so binary since a downturn represents doom to some but incredible opportunity to others. And even for those for whom it’s a challenge, an across-the-board response is rarely the right one.
At times like this, strategy becomes more valuable than ever. Know where you’re trying to go, the best way to get there, and how you’re going to know that you’ve arrived. Cut those marketing tactics that won’t help get you there and re-invest the money in the tactics that will.
3. Negotiate pricing
All the vectors you use to communicate to your marketplace are feeling the pinch right now. There is no better time to play hardball on pricing, or to negotiate added extras that usually cost a lot more. Most media outlets will cut their line rates or give you valuable extras like a free newsletter distribution, web conference, white paper distribution or even additional insertions. Trade show organizers may agree to a bigger booth space for the same price or throw in sponsorship opportunities or show guide advertising that in better times might cost you thousands more. Even if your supplier must hold the line on fundamentals, see if you can’t snag some of the valuable extras.
4. If you have channel or other partners, consider pooling budgets and activities to make your dollars go further
Can you share a trade show booth with partners? Can you initiate a co-op advertising program that sees you put up some of the cost while your channel partners put up the rest? Is the opposite available to you — are you a channel for an OEM with a co-op program?
5. Do not abandon measurement
If marketing is seen as the easiest thing for companies to cut during a downturn, then measurement is seen as the easiest thing for marketers to cut. After all, it doesn’t really contribute anything, right? Wrong. Harken back to tip No. 2: If you’re not measuring, you have no idea where you are or what got you there, you don’t know what’s working and what isn’t, and you simply can’t be strategic about your marketing spend. When times are good and there’s budget to spare, you might be able to afford to have some things work a little less effectively. When times are tough and every dollar must produce a result, you need to be measuring so you know which tactics are delivering and which ones aren’t.
6. Be transactional if there’s an immediate opportunity
As I’ve already noted, a downturn means different things for different companies. If there is good business that can be immediately secured, be highly transactional in going after it. Alter all your messaging to “Buy now,” and focus on tactics, like advertising and direct marketing, that communicate transactional messaging best.
7. If there isn’t an immediate opportunity, go long
It’s far more likely, however, that your customer’s buying cycle has stalled; it almost certainly has lengthened. So if your customers have hunkered down waiting for the storm to pass, there’s no point in blaring the hard sell at them or offering them discounts and other incentives to immediately do something they’re simply not going to. Does this mean you, too, should hunker down and draw the blinds until things blow over? No, it means your messaging should shift to support longer-term objectives such as awareness building, thought leadership and marketplace education. Tactics like media relations, trade shows and white papers that establish your authority and expertise are a better use of your resources if this is your reality.
8. In all communications, employ story telling that emphasizes how your product or service saves money or drives additional immediate revenue for your customers. Speak to the pain they’re feeling in a recession
Whatever the economic conditions, your marketing and communications messaging should be all about your customer, not you. You should always be speaking to the pain your customer feels that your product or service solves. In a recession, your customer’s pain is almost certainly all about revenue — making more of it or keeping more of it. Make sure you’re speaking to this.
9. Be overly attentive to your existing revenue base
“Love the one you’re with,” says the old song, and that’s never more relevant than in a downturn, when new customers are hardest to acquire. Your current customers are keeping you in business and it’s almost always cheaper to maintain and build business with existing customers than to find new ones. Lavish your existing customers with love, look for low-cost ways to improve the value you create for them, and communicate, communicate, communicate — let them know you love them.
10. Effective relationships never expire, so keep talking
Keep talking to everyone in your value chain, including suppliers, service providers, channels, influencers and, of course, customers and prospects. Even if they can’t use your services or you theirs just now, keeping those lines of communication open and full of useful information will serve you very well when the economy recovers.
