The marketer is typically sitting on a hot tin roof. She needs to decide either way to ensure that her sales are not affected. What does she do?

There is a menu of options, really. What must the marketer do? Discount her product to the trade to ensure a greater amount of stocking and therefore better displays? Offer discount to the consumer to create that much-needed sale? Offer more quantities of the product to ensure that home-stocking goes up? Cut costs at the production end? Cut costs at the advertising and promotion expenditure level? Or cut out advertising altogether?

The menu is complex and the decisions are tough. And no decision is really a solution on its own.

I do believe marketers need to think long-term when faced with pressures such as these. My mantra is clear. Do not discount your product at all. Take the temporary hit in volume, but avoid for sure the long-term hit on your brand image. Your brand image has been cobbled together over years of hard work. Don’t fritter it away at the doorstep of a temporary phenomenon such as recession.

Recession is essentially a postponement of purchase, waiting for better times to dawn. Better times will dawn for sure as you live in a roller-coaster economy. Avoid taking the soft option of discounting. The softest bullet to bite.

Offer instead a bit more of your product to the consumer. Offer 200 gm more of tea on a 500 gm buy. Make a bundled offer — DVD with a television set. Make it look like a combo offer. Don’t let it look like an overt discount. Consumers like added value. Combo offers live longer in the consumer home than the memory of that short-term Rs 5 discount on that pack of tea you sold in a hurry.

And advertise all this in a big manner of impact.

Should a marketer cut her advertising spends at all? Maybe a 20 per cent cut? Don’t! Difficult times come and go. Difficult times are the ones in which your product needs to be seen on the television set, for sure. Remember, there is pressure on your brand at the level of the trade channels that handle you. You need to support the channel for sure. The crutch of advertising needs to remain. But leverage it differently.

Your consumer needs positive vibes in an economy that is tanking. Your advertising creatives must be shaped sensitively to give out those positive vibes for your brand and its consumption. I do believe you need to have special sets of creatives that talk a different tone and tenor when the consumer’s chips are down in the market. Emotive advertising can help here a lot. Try it.

Print is a great medium to use, just as television is. Use it strategically. Remember, one of the important roles of advertising is its ability to act as a balm on the brand you tout. A balm that actually helps the consumer go thorough his period of possible dissonance in participating in the buying mode of life.

One final thing to do. Reach out to the consumer 1:1. Give him more service. Give him more product. Give him emotive advertising that is time-relevant, rather than time-insensitive.

When there is affected consumer demand, remember, there is an affected consumer psyche behind it. Take care of that affected consumer psyche with sensitivity, and you will ride out this trough as well.

Advertising is a great ally to use. Use it intelligently.

What does Satyam do now? Is this the end of the road?

- S.P. Sinha, Mumbai

Sinha-saab, not at all! This is just the beginning. A lot can be done for sure. A lot can happen over Satyam.