credit crunch soap opera

I’m just returning from the Marketing magazine credit crunch conference. Thanks for all of your questions (and congratulations to Jeff for winning a Brand Camp book). I’ll post my full takeaways when I’m not feeling quite so knackered from the long day (nothing quite takes it out of you like a day talking through the credit crunch).

The tone was largely optimistic and the focus was on finding opportunities rather than bellyaching. The day spanned quite a wide gambit from how to think about pricing to how to think about adding more value.

I gave a short case study on how method tries to create “value” without discounting. I think method is an interesting case study during a recession because in a way, the whole cleaning category has been in a recession for decades.  Everything we’ve ever done has been to create “value” in the middle of commodity soup (and get consumers to love us enough to send us photos like this handwash recycled as a butterfly)

I’m posting my presentation below in case you find it useful. They asked me talk about sustainability and ethics. I talked about that, and how important it is to us as a company, but I also made the argument that green is not a marketing position. And consumers are reframing how they think of sustainability, particularly if asked to pay a premium for it.

So, I recommended that sustainably-minded brands think about becoming “beyond green” by communicating more than sustainable principles.  Keep sustainable principles at the core, but find other ways to bring brand value.  It can't be the only thing to warrant a premium. 

At method, we try to reframe planetary health as personal health (talking toxic chemicals in the bathtub rather than toxic chemicals in the waterstreams), because it's more directly meaningful to consumers. 

And, you'll see, we do quite a bit with design.

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Comments

[neilperkin]

Great presentation Tom. Some great points in here - particularlt like "we see green as an aspect of product quality"

[Jon Moss]

Tom,

Really enjoyed the presentation - great content and look / design, as I have come to expect from method :-)

Did you do a check to see how many people in the audience were a) aware of method and b) bought method? Being a critical bunch of marketeers, this would have given some interesting stats!

Best,

Jon

[Tom Fishburne]

Thanks, Neil and Jon,
Actually, I was pleasantly surprised by the audience. More than 60% in the audience knew of method and quite a few mentioned buying it. The most from any previous talk I've given. So, an encouraging crowd all around...