It is mostly comedians who unwittingly create catchphrases. Sometimes, others also prove adept at the art. I sometimes wish that I had had a pound for every time I heard Gordon Brown, when UK finance minister over the last decade, utter the phrase 'no return to boom and bust'.
For someone like Brown who spent a lifetime studying economics, this was perhaps a foolhardy thing to promise. Just look at the UK's history during the present and last century. Pendulum economics, often created by war, was the norm. For every good time, there was always a reckoning to come. Desperate to report bad news, the media appear desperate to scream recession from their headlines, but for those in the communications industry, a downturn in economic fortunes can offer both challenges and opportunities.
Recent rises in the cost of fuel and food will certainly have created the need for creative thinking and marketing in those industries. In others, where the accountants reign supreme, it is a fair bet that PR budgets and staffing will now be under threat. Instead of thinking how relationships between business and customers can be reinforced, my experience is that marketing budgets are the first to suffer.
Operating environments might become harder, but what the media minimises is the fact that life carries on. A downturn might provide the impetus for companies to consider how they can still achieve results, but in more cost-effective ways. Once working in a public affairs environment, the budgets were slashed by over 80%. Events and presentations that cost money were no longer viable. The alternative was an increased programme of contact with key opinion formers, either in person or even by phone. The beneficial results, that prepared the way for the inevitable improvement, astonished those who correlated the size of budget to the scale of results.
At a time of recession, it might appear facile to say that corporate communications need to be tied even closer to what consumers wish to hear, but some sectors either pretend that there has been no change to the environment, or terminate their dialogue with consumers entirely. This week, I was trying to book some tickets with an airline which had just reported a collapse in profits. After grappling with an inoperative website, I gave up. A local retailer, rather than responding to a diminishing wallet in the pocket, carries on extolling environmental messages which patently do not resonate as much as they might have done some months ago. Look at the current success of stores like Aldi and Lidl versus the others. That tells its own story.
Creating relationships with customers and opinion formers during difficult times might require more effort than in boom times, but in my experience, these tend to produce longer-term dividends. If there was ever a time that showed how PR can work in the medium to longer term, we are now there.
We will soon see which PR people seize the opportunities created by the new economic circumstances. I hope they outnumber those who fail to rise to the challenges.
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