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In Recession, Market Enthusiasm

Marc Tracy bizbox.slate.com

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April 4, 2009

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Business Forecasting 2012

Our special feature on forecasting sheds light on how to choose the right model, offers advice from Jack Stack and more.

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Things are dire. Consumer spending is shockingly low. The last thing people want to do is spend their increasingly scarce money. Meanwhile, securing said money for yourself involves selling things--in other words, persuading these people, holding ever more tightly to their increasingly scarce money, to give some of it to you. What do you do?

According to the latest trends emanating from Madison Avenue, you tell people that they can do anything. The New York Times reports that Quaker Oats's new advertising motto is literally, "Go humans go". In fact, the buzzword appears to be "go". Visa's new slogan is, "More people go with Visa" (disclosure: BizBox is sponsored by American Express OPEN); Hillshire Farm now declares, "Go meat!" The campaigns attempt to accomplish the double service of attesting to the merits of the particular product while also instilling a much broader sense of optimism, positivity, and the can-do spirit. If you humans can do anything, the thinking seems to go, then you humans can certainly eat oatmeal every day for breakfast. It's the least you could do, really.

So how does this translate to your business? We're generally not fans of smaller companies deploying what sometimes sounds like canned sloganeering--that's not exploiting your advantage over the big guys as much as playing right to their advantage. But the idea of using optimism to sell during a recession strikes as compelling, to say the least. And who knows? In trying to instill optimism in others, you might just give a much-needed dose of it to yourself.

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