It used to be that only certain professions and businesses had to really listen closely with empathy to their client’s needs. Retail businesses in more prosperous times weren’t in the business of playing counselor, coach, or advocate. That’s all changed as consumers around the country are struggling with a bad economy, causing them to change their previously unquestioning consumer mentality to one of careful frugality. In an environment like this, the only way to customize your marketing and business strategies is to pay close attention to your customer’s needs and try to meet them.

The Big Three Components of Consumer Demand

Many of the issues that customers are going to face in this recession are the same: Reduced income, increased expenses, and solutions that don’t meet their immediate needs. As we know from business theories, consumer demand is comprised of three components: Income level, personal preference, and price. There is not much a business can do about customers’ falling income levels. There are some things that can be done with pricing; however, downward pricing can create a risk to the bottom line profitability of the business, so the only other way to influence consumer demand is through preference.

Retailers Phasing Out Choices

It makes sense for big retailers who must carry inventory to phase out choices that aren’t in wide demand and to cater to mass tastes. That’s where online businesses can have an edge in this economy as they can offer the choice without necessarily inventorying it. If they listen to many of their customers who are having difficulty finding a particular solution that can only be bought online, they can offer this and raise the demand for their services by using this strategy.

Understand The Nature of Consumer Demand

Yes, people will have less to spend and become more frugal, but this doesn’t mean that consumers will naturally gravitate to the cheapest choice. In fact, value becomes more important as the length of the recession is anyone’s guess. A purchase that lasts longer is of better value than a great product that crashes, breaks, or looks worn a few months down the line. Consumers are becoming more sophisticated on buying not only things that solve their personal problems and preferences, but they are now demanding that they stand up to the test of time. If you can meet both of these needs, you will have clients for life, long after this recession is over.

Chris Anderson, author of “The Long Tail,” hypothesizes that even though classic marketing assumes that 80% of sales come from 20% of your customers, chasing “the long tail” of customers not in that 20% can be a viable online strategy. That’s because online businesses are great at providing choice, something that physical brick-and-mortar stores can’t stock or inventory the same way since they are not virtual enterprises. But, is chasing the long tail still a good strategy in a recession where consumer demand is dropping drastically?

Why The Long Tail Creates Demand

Yes, it is a good idea to think about chasing the long tail. The reasons for that are two-fold: Physical retailers are already reducing inventory and dropping choices and online retailers don’t have to stock or inventory a selection or choice in order to offer it. So, the same reason that makes it unthinkable for physical retailers makes it a great choice for online merchants. After all, demand may be slowing for the best sellers, but the long tail is not about best sellers; it’s about personal preference. When a consumer has a personal preference for a particular product or service, they will look to get that choice fulfilled regardless of the cost, even in a down economy. And, even if a retailer offers this choice in their physical stores, an online business is better suited to drop the price on it because they are not keeping their stock in physical inventory. They are doing “just-in-time” demand fulfillment.

Look Up Affiliates, Partners, and Order Fulfillment Services

In order to capitalize on this strategy, there is a bit more upfront market research. You want to locate affiliates, partners, and order fulfillment services that can help you market the long tail without necessarily having to create products yourself or ship them. That way, they can remain in other people’s physical inventory until you get an order and are ready to fulfill that order. If you line up a great team of suppliers who you can use to create a vast choice, then you will create demand where there was none because you are offering something in one place that few others are able to do offline. If you make it easy to search online, then you create the ability for the customer to service his/her own needs and to exactly specify their preferences.

There are offline businesses going into bankruptcy everywhere. In a time of prosperity, people rush to buy the latest electronic gadget or to get the latest bath accessories, one for each change of the season. So, your market niche may have done well when the economy was doing well, but now you’ve noticed a down tick in purchases. What’s going on? Don’t assume that this is a product of the economic recession; instead, be proactive and try to determine what factors are affecting your sales. It could be the economy, but it could also be various other factors: A shifting demographic, poor sales strategies that don’t work in a downturn, or bad or no advertising campaign.

Shifting Demographics

When you set up your business, you probably had a good idea of what demographic you wanted to serve. With the recession, the demographic you serve may have had shifts in their income level or even living situations. Take a look at the boomer generation. They are experiencing an epic shift in their income as they retire, with battered retirement accounts from poor market results. Even though you could rely on this demographic to purchase certain products and services as they continued to dominate the market, this may not be true in the future. So, you need to re-evaluate the demographics that you are serving in your market niche.

Sales Strategies

Running the same promotions with worse results? That’s not really surprising considering that the psychology of the market place has changed dramatically and that the consumer may not be in a buying mood for a while. Before the recession, status was a great psychological trigger to use to create a buying opportunity. The same trigger is somewhat meaningless in a downturn unless you are marketing to the very rich. The biggest strategy for the downturn is going to be value offers; you need to make sure that many of your strategies reflect a trigger for value.

Bad or No Advertising Campaigns

The immediate impulse of business owners in a downturn is to stop throwing money at advertising since there are fewer buyers. This is a mistake and can be a self-fulfilling prophecy for poor sales later on. So, if you haven’t evaluated your advertising campaign, you need to do that now. Look at where you are advertising, what psychological triggers and sales strategies you are using, and whether you can provide value offers that put you ahead of the competition during this tough economy.

There’s no question that value is going to be the most important element of the buying decision for most consumers during this recession. But, it isn’t just the consumer that has this in mind. Our entire society is beginning to question the mindless consumerism that has created environmental nightmares and economic bubbles that collapse, leaving many destitute overnight. Slow, and steady growth is a way to create real value in one’s life and also to preserve it when a downturn occurs. And, for that, you need products and services that meet a “real” need, that last a while, and that are reasonably priced.

What’s A Real Need?

The focus in a sustainable economy is to produce items that provide real value to the user or society. So, you see that even though oil is the basis of our energy economy, there is a whole lot of talk about increasing incentives so that green businesses can come into their own. There is a real need to provide energy that is not dependent on foreign oil and green alternatives will meet that real need.

For consumers, a real need can translate to any of the products or services that have to be purchased, regardless of the state of the economy. These are food, fuel, shelter, clothing, and health care. For those that are out of a job, retraining them in skills will make education a “real” need too. So, anything that is catering to the needs of the marketplace and solving an economic problem is going to be a real need at this time. It doesn’t mean that other products and services won’t be able to sell online, just that some market niches are more recession-resistant than others based on the value of that product or service.

Longevity

Clothing retailers are seeing people focusing on apparel that lasts, rather than quickly opting for the cheapest option. That might mean that fashion or fads are less desirable and classics are in. Real fabrics that last longer may be seen as a better value than synthetics or items that need dry cleaning to maintain. Quality will determine longevity and retailers are now reducing choice to stock up on high-quality classics, where people know they are getting good value.

Reasonable Prices

If you can’t offer something for a reasonable price, then don’t bother to offer it at all. This is especially true of the marketers that catered to middle-income people who were trying to raise their status through buying more designer wear or “image”-conscious buys. The income level of the middle class has been downgraded, for the most part, and price is now a vital concern for many. But this doesn’t mean you have to completely slash your prices; just make sure you provide the best value for the money and you will continue to attract customers.

When the bottom line deteriorates due to a poor economy, it’s time to start figuring out whether your market niche has any useful marketing life left. If you were one of the people who owned horse-and-buggy companies when the automobile first came out, your market niche was doomed, but you probably didn’t know it because the Great Depression was slowing everyone’s sales down. The fact is that depressions and recessions have a way of spurring innovation and business creativity as business owners seek to provide a solution to the market to create demand for their businesses. If that innovation impacts your market niche, you may be in trouble, but otherwise, many of the same market niches will continue to exist, but only the proactive business owners will be able to survive.

What Happens Might Depend On You

Before you throw in the towel, think about the ways you can become more adaptable to the changing market. Have you looked at where your traffic is coming from and if that’s changed? Have you reviewed your advertising campaigns? Have you figured out where the demand is for your market niche? Do you know who is buying and why? Are you asking for feedback from your customers? Many questions are going to have to be addressed to be as proactive as you can be to help your business survive.

What Innovations Are Impacting Your Business?

Many are not right now, as the green economy is not enough of a threat to your business to warrant attention. But, what happens if a stimulus bill is passed to make them highly competitive? Do you know what you can do to play in that ball field? How might you thrive or go bust if such a thing occurs? Keep an eye on government regulations during this down economy as they can severely impact your market niche, quite often overnight.

Can You Widen Your Market Niche?

If you see that things are going to be tough, why not try to gain some market share in previously untapped markets? You can do this on the Internet very easily by trying to find ways to appeal to newer foreign markets or demographics. You might even find uses for your products and services that appeal to people having a tough time right now; all you need to do is communicate how your market niche can serve their needs too. Don’t throw in the towel until you’ve reviewed things thoroughly, and then, make an informed decision to go forward, change your strategies, or close your doors.

There are more and more surprises with this recession. The environment for doing business has certainly gotten tougher, with companies laying off people in order to curtail runaway costs in their budgets. Certain industries are suffering severely, and that might make you think that there aren’t any prospering, but that’s not true. In addition, not every demographic has suffered equally. To really understand the environment of this recession, one has to pay attention to what industries are affected most and why some people suffer more than others.

Collapsing Industries

Obviously, the biggest problem with the economy started with the collapse of the housing market around the country. This led to layoffs in construction and a huge drop-off of real estate investments. Lenders who lent money to people who could not afford their mortgages also got affected as buyer after buyer got foreclosed, depressing the markets and the income levels in certain regions across the country. The economies that had real estate booms with double-digit gains during previous years are now the ones facing a large glut of foreclosed homes and many unemployed workers.

This is trickling into other areas, not just construction. Financial services areas are in stasis, frozen with fear, about where the next credit or debt problem will arise in the market. Borrowing has become very difficult and that has affected retailers and businesses that have to borrow to make payroll or operating expenses. Many of these closed too.

In addition, banks with unsupportable balance sheets have had to be bailed out to keep the economy from teetering into oblivion. These are times for people with nerves of steel and an ability to weed out the real bad news from the panic that keeps reasonable decisions from being made to provide a path back to prosperity.

Don’t Hide, Analyze

Every downturn provides an opportunity as well as a calamity. Smart business owners know that in order to have a business, one has to provide solutions to problems that are out there, and right now, there are plenty of problems out there. By analyzing the trends going on in the marketplace, Internet marketers can start to figure out how to position themselves for the next cycle in the economy that always takes place after a recession: Recovery. Until then, they can crunch the demographics numbers, the market returns, and the changing needs to better adapt to changing market forces.

If you’ve delayed learning about the myriads of ways you can earn money in advertising online, now’s the time to jump in. While the economy may be soft, this gives companies more of an incentive to advertise online a bit more. The traditional avenues of advertising like television, newspapers, and magazines are struggling with fewer viewers, subscribers, and buyers. However, free sources of entertainment and media like the Internet and radio are bound to gain in audience during the recession. So, while companies are advertising more in this media, there should be a greater opportunity to make money in advertising online.

Fine-Tune Your Advertising Strategy

Just as your competitors gear up big campaigns online, you also need to check out what strategies are going to work best for you. You can hire copywriters to beef up your sales pages or provide the right psychological triggers for buyers who are scared to spend right now. Then you want to see if there are places you can monetize your websites with other people’s advertisements to bring in some income. Make sure that any advertising copy that you provide to your affiliate partners for your own affiliate program comes with the training that tells them how to make the most effective use of it. In a recession, the competition can be fierce for the consumer’s dollars and advertising is going to give you an edge.

Keep Up With The Jones’

Except here, the Jones’ are really your competitors. Sign up to some of their affiliate programs or newsletters. Make sure you are aware of what promotions your competitors are promoting and how they are using their advertising to squeeze the dollar out of their subscriber’s pocketbooks. Try to learn from what your competitors do and then raise the bar by being even more innovative and creative.

The Nitty-Gritty Details

It may not be fun or glamorous, but understanding the difference between pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, and pay-per-sale and how much of each you want to implement is important for optimizing your advertising revenues. You may even want to check out cost-per-action networks to see if they provide more money than the traditional product-oriented models. You can expect the area of advertising to become even more creative as marketers attempt to provide flexible and innovative options in a tough economy and you want to be in the front lines of that action.

Tracking demand isn’t as simple as just tracking consumer demand. In our global economy, in order to track trends in the future marketplace, it takes a lot more than just looking at a particular market niche and consumer demand for the products and services there. This is especially true on the Internet where customers come from all over; demand can be very tricky to predict. However, the four components of demand usually stem from four different areas of the marketplace: Consumer, business, government, and foreign demand. Once you understand that, you can try to keep an eye on the bigger forces that can affect your market niche in order to predict future demand for your area.

Consumer Demand

This is the one area businesses can track quite well, just by looking at their own sales, the state of the local or national economy, and how well their competitors are doing. Right now, consumer demand may be down because the United States, the powerhouse of consumer demand, has lost millions of jobs since the start of the recession. The unemployment level has increased to almost 7% and might end up being in the double digits by mid-year if nothing changes. The loss of jobs impacts consumer demand as people lose their homes, cars, and other possessions that need to be maintained or replaced at regular intervals. They simply don’t have the money to do so. But, that doesn’t mean that there is no consumer demand; it just means that demand in the market can shift and may be more influenced by other components for a while.

Business Demand

Businesses create demand because they have to get suppliers for their goods and services. They employ people who go out and buy things. They sell to each other too in business-to-business transactions. Keeping an eye on which businesses are failing and how that leaves more potential for smaller businesses that want to service the leftover demand is a good way to start getting a bigger picture of demand for your market niche.

Government Demand

In recessionary times, government intervenes to try to put some social safety nets in place. With that action, like a stimulus package, they create demand for goods and services, but they end up footing the bill, which eventually gets passed on to the taxpayer.

Foreign Demand

This is basically the exports to a country minus the imports. If a country like China ends up with a huge middle class, they may be clamoring for goods and services that they do not manufacture in their country, creating a demand in the U.S. So, depending on how countries relate to each other and the value of the currency exchange between them, demand can rise and fall as things change across national boundaries.