Frugal Marketing Strategy in Recessionary times
Contributed by Ankush Garg
When recession hits hard, consultants are the first ones to be shown the door. The next are the marketing teams.
Organizations worldwide slash marketing budgets in difficult times. While the some purists contend that recession is the best time to strengthen the brand and get a competitive edge, the question is how? The funds are scarce and they need to be channeled into the essentials of the business to keep it running.
While increase in the marketing budgets in difficult times may continue to a distant dream for most marketers, the circumstances offer opportunity to become more effective.
Retail Chains all geared to fight Slowdown
Country's leading retail outlets are coming up with startegies to fight from the overall slowdown in sales. Though the promotions at the year-end have given a little cheer to otherwise slowdown-hit retailers but there has been a fall in the overall sales in the Oct-Dec. period. Here too, the advantage has gone to the value-formats while high-end stores were the worst-hit.
Retailers Association of India(RAI) feels that the growth of the organised retail which stands at Rs.27000 crore as against the total retail market of Rs.20 lakh crore will fall down from 35% to 10-12% in 2008-09.
Suspecting this, most of the big retailers are implementing various strategies like inventory optimization, supply chain efficiency, better product assortment, reducing number of SKUs, lowering the operating costs, etc. For example, Future Group is taking initiative towards customizing the product assortment according to a particular locality to suit the requirements of the people residing there. Shopper's Stop is focusing on making it supply chain more efficient by scaling down their back-end infrastructure.
