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.