Brand Central Station

(Company Press Release)

BOSTON – Innoveer Solutions, an award-winning customer strategy and solutions consultancy, today announced the availability of its most recent white paper, “The Pursuit of Partner Relationship Management,” which details how companies can expand their reach, reduce costs, and minimize risks by sharing more sales-related responsibilities with their business partners during uncertain economic times. The paper is now available in the white paper library on Innoveer’s website.

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Think there’s confusion in the world’s financial markets?  That’s nothing compared to the world of marketing – where uncertainty, confusion and out-right panic are not out of the question.

Economic recessions are tough to understand.  For many small and mid-sized businesses, the national recession indicators manifest themselves in ways that often go unreported by the mass media.  Add to that the general sense of desperation felt by consumers and business owners and managers are often left wondering what they could have done to avoid their difficulties and at a complete loss about what to do going forward.

So, let’s try to take a step back and understand the nature of this particular recession and what options lay ahead for the small and mid-sized business when it comes to evaluating and re-loading their marketing plans for the rest of 2008 and all of 2009.  (Yeah, you heard that right – you better be thinking about a total re-boot of your marketing program starting tomorrow because the only thing you can count on in this recession is that your plans made six to ten months ago are out-of-touch with today’s economic reality.) (more…)

Times are tough.  We all know that.  And the employment news lately has been bad.  Nearly 600,000 people lost their jobs in November.  And unlike past job losses and economic downturns, the news is reported in real time by those employees directly impacted by the cuts.

Thanks to blogs, IM’s, discussion boards, social networking sites and micro-blogging tools like Twitter, employees are writing about their personal experiences – and the effect is rippling through organizations that have nothing to do with the layoffs.  Kami Huyse, writing in her Communications Overtones blog, provides seven suggestions to HR directors on how to approach announcing layoffs and handling the resulting need for discussion and empathy inside the organization:

The layoff (especially mass layoffs) will most likely be blogged, Twittered or otherwise related in a public forum

The company should consider putting out an official story about the layoffs and voicing genuine concern

The company will always be the bad guy, but this can be mitigated by doing the right thing

A personal touch is needed for these situations, forget mail, e-mail or SMS messages

Minimize faceless and policy-driven thinking

Remember that investors, future employees and your mother is watching how this is handled

Remaining employees will be demoralized by a brutal layoff – they could be next after all, plus they will have survivors guilt

HR staff and corporate managers shouldn’t fall into a trap of thinking they only have to worry about employees’ feelings when layoffs hit their operation.  The social aspect of online media today means that the losses and trauma experienced by employees at one company are now shared through their informal networks – networks that extend beyond the walls of the enterprise and can include friends, family members and colleagues at other businesses all over the world.

Job loss creates very real grief in both the person losing the job and that person’s friends and family.  According to this piece on job loss grief, written by Carolyn Wilkin at the University of Florida, there are steps to the process of dealing with job loss grief – and there are things people can do to help their friends through those steps.

Corporate owners and managers should be proactive though, recognizing the potential for lost productivity if they fail to recognize and deal with the side effects of the broader economic stresses on the economy.

I’ve received some positive feedback on this article posted nearly two weeks ago about what businesses need to do to market themselves effectively in an economic recession.  Over the weekend, I found this post on Dave Lakhani’s Bold Approach blog.

In it, Dave rants on about people who are keeping their head stuck in the ground when it comes to addressing the very real business issues that are brought on by an economic recession:

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