For most of us, most of the time, everything in marketing runs smoothly, but occasionally things don’t.

When the marketing doesn’t go well it is often because companies feel they are not getting any increase in sales, and (if they are clients of ours) they feel our techniques don’t bring about the upturn they wanted.  Alternatively if this is a new company, what they find is that the firm is simply not taking off.

So the question is, what to do when you have tried several different approaches and none of them work?  Sadly for many firms the temptation is to reign in the marketing and do little or nothing.

In one way this can appear to be a workable solution, especially if you have products that lead to repeat business.  You cut your marketing costs and business still comes along and move back into profit.

Unfortunately that cannot last forever because old customers drift away, especially if you have a rival in the market place who is out seeking to take your customers away from you.  You are not advertising, he/she is, and so the drift gets worse.

Fortunately there is another solution, and that involves changing the business model.  Let me give a couple of examples.

First you can put prices up dramatically. This may seem counter intuitive, but within our own publishing company we’ve done this a couple of times and greatly increased profits each time.  Just because the competition are selling something similar at a lower price, you don’t have to be sucked into their price arena.

Second you can put the price down. You might have feelings about damaging the value of the overall product if you do this, but in that case, just sell a rebranded part of the product (see my note on inventing a new company below).  After all if you have 100 products sitting in your warehouse that will not sell at £500 then they are worth nothing.  Sell them at £200 each and at least you have some income.

Third you can change the selling model. If you are selling your products on a subscription so that people have to buy the whole series, then look at selling them individually.  If they are paying monthly consider having them pay annually or weekly.

Last, create a new company and rebrand. This might sound bizarre, but we’ve done it ourselves and we have found it a very successful approach.   Let’s imagine you have a £500 product and you want to experiment at selling it for £100, but you don’t want anyone to realise that this is the same product as is being sold for £500.

First, you get a new web site at a new address, open a new account with the bank (they still take our money even if they won’t lend any), and add a new phone line (the cost is very low) and email address (ditto).   Build the simple web site, rebrand the product, sell it in a different way.  Maybe the £100 version doesn’t have technical support or is missing a few extra bits and pieces in the £500 version.   Now you are appealing to two different markets without it looking as if you are cutting prices.  (If all this sounds complex, it isn’t – we’ve done it for some of our Velocity clients and it takes about two weeks).

Here’s one example of these processes in practice.  We sell a course for £800.  For those who don’t want to pay that much we have a reduced part of the course for £250.   And for those who don’t want a course at all, we have a couple of books which are taken from the course, which sell at £24.95.   Are we reducing the value of the course (in that the people who buy the books might have come on the course).  Maybe – but we think there are many people who simply won’t do the course, so better to sell them something than nothing.

Put like that, it sounds simple, but it is not always so easy to see from inside one’s own business.

If you would like to explore this approach, do give myself or my colleagues a call on 01536 399 000.  There’s also the Velocity programme which incorporates techniques like this.  Details are on www.velocity.ac

If you are interested in advertising techniques you might enjoy our Creative Direct news group (CreativeDirect-subscribe@yahoogroups.com ) and the blog that runs with it www.goodad.co.uk

Tony Attwood