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Samantha Kierath

Few forces drive marketplace change like a prolonged economic slump. As consumers struggle to make more from less and reassess their habitual decisions, suppliers battle to keep up with the trade-offs and ahead of the competition. 
The changes are generally continual and dramatic, with fortune favouring the financially fit and flexible, according to Peter Steidl, author of Survive, Exploit, Disrupt, Action - Guidelines for Marketing in a Recession. 
In this era of evolutionary commerce, it's survival of the nimblest. Steidl says that recessions mean companies have to constantly realign their marketing strategies to the changing conditions and cannot rely on simply spending their way out of trouble or cutting across the corporate board. 
Unpredictability is the one certainty and the strategies that worked so well in the lead-up to the downturn are likely to no longer apply. Recessions are game-changers and amid the turmoil, sensitivity to shifting tastes and decision-making speed can trump advertising expenditure and economies of scale in determining market share and longer-term survival.
Under these conditions, companies cannot hope to stem losses by continuing to refine their existing processes or selective cost-cutting - they must re-examine their fundamental business concept. 
Firms must think less about what they spend and more about how they allocate funding; they must change from ''doing things right' to 'doing the right thing'', from doing existing business better to doing business in a better way. They also need to integrate early warning systems about consumer behaviour into their operations to build up a broad picture of purchasing decisions. 
In changing times, small-scale surveys and 'touch-point audits' - rather than large, detailed studies - can help marketers understand whether buyers are expanding their purchasing horizons to consider cheaper options or are seeking out alternative products to satisfy the same emotional needs. 
This is because a large part of consumer behaviour will be driven by fear and the need to cope with immediate challenges, making it difficult for customers to give reliable information about their spending plans for the weeks and months ahead. Executives can complement this reported data through immersion, by developing their own intuitive feel for the market. 
This can mean going shopping with a consumer or listening in on domestic bill-paying discussions. 
'Immersion programmes are king in times of recession',  Steidl says, and 'it is typically better to act too early rather than too late'.
While  Steidl hesitates to give away too many examples of companies that survived and prospered during previous recessions, his point about sensitivity to environment is well made: riding out the recession means picking up on the early warning signs of change before everybody else.
Samantha Kierath is a freelance writer



Early warning still the best defence