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Steering into the skid

OK. You’re driving down the road. The conditions are treacherous. But not enough to slow you down yet. Suddenly, something causes you to swerve. You fight for purchase but the wheels don’t hold. And you find yourself careening out of control in a white knuckle skid.

Are you heading into a ditch? Is a crash inevitable? Not if you do what’s counterintuitive. You heard right. You’ve got to go against your natural tendencies and instincts. And follow this one fundamental rule:

Accelerate and steer into the skid.

The reason why has everything to do with physics. And the explanation is pretty cool. As long as your front wheels are skidding, you have no directional control of the car. So turning your wheels in the direction of the skid allows the wheels to actually start rolling in the direction of motion again. Only once the wheels are rolling can turning them affect the direction of the car. Note to you wonks out there: this situation is technically known as “oversteer.”

You can learn more about it from the Ask a Scientist feature on the University of Chicago’s Newton BBS site (where I got this explanation from) or from driving sites like edmunds.com. Or you can give it a whirl yourself. Please just not in midtown Manhattan where we work. Or anywhere near our clients. Or anyone else for that matter…

So where are we going with all this “don’t drive like my brother” car talk? It just so happens to be a fitting aphorism for marketing when the road gets rough and rocky. And it’s safe to say we’re experiencing economic hardscrabble the likes of which we’ve never seen in our lifetimes.

Sergio Zyman once remarked that “marketing money is like fuel in the car.” Take the fuel out, he said, and the car skids to a stop. Even more apropos, research on past recessions–and we’ve had seven of them since the Great Depression–shows that businesses that maintain aggressive marketing programs in a downturn outperform companies relying on cost-cutting measures. In fact, history also shows that retrenching and divesting slows momentum and leaves room for competitors to grow. So there’s a relationship between recessionary marketing spending and long-term growth.

Said another way, businesses and brands would do well to “steer into the skid” during the hard times like today. Just ask Jack Neff from AdAge, who wrote a great piece in May highlighting how previous downturns provided big upsides–and some big category-changing, margin-improving innovations. Like airline loyalty programs, fast-food value meals, the IBM personal computer, Crest Whitestrips and Axe Body Spray. All born during economic set-backs, Neff points out.

This even goes for the mighty iPod, too. Date of introduction: just over a month after September 11.

So what can marketers do? What’s the GPS equivalent of steering into the skid and staying the course when we’re clearly off-roading? Or feel like we’re driving blind?

My colleague Cathy Calhoun, consumer marketer extraordinaire, recently put her sage and savvy mind to this task in a speech to a group of CMOs. And I promise to see if she will share her insights with us. That is, once I can break out of the heart stopping, skidding paralysis of watching the markets crash further and further each day. Parenthetically, the tips section on edmunds.com says that driving experts call this “target fixation.” That is: focusing on your impending doom instead of taking proper evasive action. They say this will result in a crash. OK, I got that now. Just might need some more practice…

In the meantime, we welcome your thoughts and experiences about how marketers can steer into the skid to not only avoid this economic crash but gain real advantage for their businesses and brands.

Special thanks to Cathy Calhoun, Co-Head of Weber Shandwick Consumer Marketing, Isabelle Papoulias of McCann Erickson New York, and Alan Kercinik of Weber Shandwick Chicago for sharing their research, thinking and insights on this topic.