Marketing | Teik Oh

Recession proof your business

Jan 02 2015

Is it possible to recession-proof your business? Probably not, despite the wealth of internet articles on how to do so (about 3.3 million hits on Google and counting).

However, what is possible is to arm your business with a series of simple and common sense business strategies to protect it against tough times.

There are defensive and offensive strategies. As profit performance heads south, it is difficult not to panic and begin to tighten all the hatches. However you can tighten too much. Hence, while it is natural to concentrate on the defensive strategies, it is important to keep in mind offensive strategies – those that your business should implement to ensure that you are the one in your industry that keeps selling when others are closing down.

Let us deal with the defensive strategies first. There are six strategies that you need to implement. These are:
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3 Rules to Keep Customers

Dec 31 2014

Businesses, and business owners, go through a natural evolutionary cycle.

Often, small businesses are started by the young (or in my case, comparatively young!) full of excitement and enthusiasm. Small business owners start with an idea – sometimes it’s simply an idea that working for yourself has got to be better than working for the Man, more often it’s the idea of making or at least selling the better mousetrap.

At the start we jump at every opportunity to “find business”. We attend seminars and hand out business cards, we follow leads, we make friends with customers and develop relationships and referral bases. However in time, the energy spent finding business dissipates somewhat. Sometimes this comes from disappointment but more usually because running a business is genuinely hard and over time, as the business employs more and more staff, it’s natural that some of those duties to find new business start to fall on new staff.
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WE are always right? Or keep questioning our old ways of thinking?

Dec 22 2014

For a brief moment women wearing burqas and niqabs were banned from sitting in the Australian Parliament’s public galleries. This was later changed as long as they revealed their faces for identification at security checkpoints.

In a show of protest three men wearing a Ku Klux Klan uniform, a motorcycle crash helmet and a niqab tried to enter the Parliament building. They were met by security outside who told them that the helmet and the KKK hat were not allowed inside whereas the person wearing the niqab would have to reveal their face but could then put the veil back on.

There followed a (mild) furore on social media about inequality and the overblown political correctness. People rallied around the cry that “we” shouldn’t bow to the powerful minority as “we” had our own standards.

However the social media commentators seem to have missed various points:-

1. They themselves had probably lived or visited overseas where local law meant that drug possession was punishable by death, that you couldn’t chew gum on the streets, that many other things we did not agree with was law, and we protested that “they” the majority should listen to “us”;

2. They recognised “our” team’s views and believed they were right but they did not recognise the “other” team’s views could possibly be right;

3. The burqa, hijab and niqab, along with saffron robes, and nuns’ habits are part of a particular religion’s accepted dress;

4. The KKK uniform is a recognisable uniform of hate and racism; and

5. A motorcycle crash helmet is a – hello – HELMET!

But what does this have to do with business?
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5 Key Social Media Policies

Dec 19 2014

Social media is now huge part of everyday life. Social media can be used as a positive tool in the branding of your organisation or it could become the bane of your organisation’s credibility. It’s not only a Facebook page to share food photos with old school friends and post emoticons.

Even though they may have a social media advertising strategy, some organisations ban it internally, not allowing staff to access social media during work hours, even to the extent of blocking it on the organisation’s IT systems. Why not embrace it, show your staff trust and give them responsibility to use social media responsibly?

Why not create and use a corporate social media policy? What should this policy include to ensure that people are using social media responsibly? Here are the 5 key items to include.
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Are high-end businesses any different from budget-goods businesses?

Dec 18 2014

A friend of mine is an artist. She and her husband, another artist, operate a gallery where they sell their paintings and run art classes.

She asked me recently if I could help them look at new ways of doing things as finding new business was as hard as ever.

I don’t know much about how good quality art galleries work, except that artists value their work because of the effort and the pain of creativity put into their creations. An artist does not paint a painting in one or two weeks. Ask any artist and they will say that each painting took a lifetime, because it was a lifetime of experience and emotion that went into each painting.

So that means they sell high-end value goods.

However I do know that selling high-end works of art is nevertheless a retail business, and retail is hurting at the moment, whether it is a high-end store or the local $2 budget store. People are more careful with their money, they look for bargains, they haggle, and if they can, they buy online. At the same time, costs are rising – from shop rents to wages for staff, and, as the cost of the shopping basket rises, the owner has to make more profit to afford their own shopping basket.
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Increase your sales through a highly focused marketing plan!

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Recession proof your business

3 Rules to Keep Customers

WE are always right? Or keep questioning our old ways of thinking?

5 Key Social Media Policies

Are high-end businesses any different from budget-goods businesses?