Today’s newsletter, The Land of Ideas & Decisions, focuses on this simple truth.  It’s simple, but it is easy to overlook as the media and conversation bombard you with bad economic news.

You can’t change macroeconomic trends, but you can influence the (microeconomic) decisions that your customers make.  Learn from the “Land of Interpretation,” but then focus your action in “The Land of Ideas & Decisions.”

Please comment on the newsletter here.  Do you see people missing the chance to affect their lives and businesses, because they are “wallowing” in bad economic news?  Are you? What kinds of ideas could your form, and what kinds of decisions could they make, that would improve your business results?

(Are you a subscriber to the newsletter? Look to the right on this page.)

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In a famous scene, Clark Gable removes his shirt before going to bed and reveals that he is not wearing an undershirt.  Legend has it that undershirt sales dropped 75%, immediately, in the U.S. After all, if Clark Gable doesn’t wear an undershirt, why should I?

Imagine you are an undershirt manufacturer in 1934.  You have three choices:

1. Say, “this is just a fad,” do nothing, and wait for undershirt sales to return to normal levels.
2. Say, “this industry is dead,” and get out of the undershirt business.
3. Say, “our world is different now.  We need to recalibrate our whole approach to our business in light of these changes.”

Not hard to guess which choice I think is the right one.  Think about this: T-shirt sales after 1934 grew exponentially, as the t-shirt became not only an undergarment but a special piece of clothing in its own right.

Now, think about your world, right now.  Changes in your world happened, essentially, in one night, and it didn’t take Clark Gable undressing for bed to cause these changes.  Your world today, on April 16, 2009, is completely different than your world on April 16, 2008.

So, what are you going to do?  Hunker down and wait for the undershirt business to come back to “normal?”  Get out of the undershirt business?  Or … recalibrate your approach to your business, finding opportunity in the new world order?

The choice is yours …

(P.S. As Arna and I were being married, on January 21st, 1984, the VHS recorder in our apartment was, at the same moment, recording It Happened One Night off of our local PBS station.)

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The day started off with a meeting with a client about a potential project.  Our discussion explored how this very successful company can develop more business from current customers, especially in these tough times where it is harder to find new customers.

As we talked, it became clear that the best answers lie not in more lucrative promotions, better offers or a new loyalty program.  It’s much more fundamental than that.  Interacting with customers during this time of economic uncertainty and turmoil requires, more than ever, an approach based on the customer interaction principles that have obsessed me for years.

• It’s not about customer service.  It’s about the relationship-building encounter. Customer service is not what you strive for; it has become basic hygiene. (Yes, some companies still don’t brush their teeth.)  The goal of every interaction between a person in your company and a customer is to make sure that the relationship with the customer is better at the end of the interaction than it was at the beginning.
• Stop shouting already! People hear Brand Harmony. This is the worst time to dial up the brute-force marketing techniques, trying to out-shout, out-promote and out-sizzle your competition.  The world is way too noisy and your customers are way too scrutinizing.  Interact with customers in a way that matches how they form impressions of you: By creating a strong sense of Brand Harmony that communicates a clear, compelling, comprehensive story.

How much better would your business be if your organization, with the talent of virtuosos, adhered to these principles?

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Don’t hunker down!  Make real changes, in a world that is really different.

Please share your comments below.

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Are you recalibrating the way you run your business and do your work to adjust to this new reality?

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I asked this question of a friend the other day, and, without hesitation, he answered, “How to motivate people to buy for a reason other than price.”

Today’s newsletter discusses my answer to the question.  I’d love to hear your answers and insights in the comments below.

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Just about everyone I talk to who has customers shares this frustration. Economic uncertainty has translated itself into decision-making paralysis.  People should buy, but they just can’t make the leap to do it.

Check out what Friedrich Nietzsche had to say in The Birth of Tragedy, written in 1872:

“For the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence contains, while it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experiences of the past become immersed.  This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will-negating mood is the fruit of these states.”

Wow. For years we’ve lived in an unreal, Dionysian world. (Dionysian can be defined as being “of an ecstatic, orgiastic or irrational nature; frenzied or undisciplined.)  Now that “everyday reality re-enters consciousness,” people feel a “will-negating” nausea, that prevents them from acting.

Recognize that it is this nausea, borne of the shell-shock of learning that our recent world is one of make-believe, that has paralyzed your customers and prospective customers.  To unfreeze your customers, you need to be the Pepto-Bismol that quiets their nausea; confidence and certainty are the best antidotes to stomach-churning uncertainty.  Help your customers get comfortable with the new reality, and help them jettison their emotional connections with the old order.

As I have written lately, this is not a recession, it is a recalibration.  Resetting your world is nauseating and discomforting.  It freezes people.  Help your customers recognize that the new order is the real order, and help them avoid the disappointments of the lost past.  It really never existed. (e.g., the lost money in your 401K never really existed.)

Nietzsche goes on to compare the Dionysian man to Hamlet, our most famous frozen decision maker who could not act. (I pulled this passage from Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, on page 393.  The orbit of the Hamlet-obsession comet has once again returned to me.)  Bloom’s and Nietzsche’s  point is not that Hamlet couldn’t decide because he was confused by the information that confronted him, but that he knew his situation too well. “An insight into the horrible truth outweighs any motive for action,” Nietzsche writes.  Your customer may not have just learned that his uncle killed his father, as Hamlet learned, but he certainly shares with Hamlet the knowledge that his world will for evermore be different.

Ok, so your customers are nauseated by this “insight into the horrible truth.”  Recognize it for what it is, and calm them down.  That’s how you’ll unfreeze them.

Yes, this means that selling has become a totally new thing.  If you’re not selling differently, you’re not helping your customers recalibrate their world, and you will find them staring back at you, mid-sales pitch, with the uncomfortable look of nausea.

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They asked a number of people, including me, to contribute to a whitepaper called, “Letters to the C-Suite: Sage Marketing Advice for Uncertain Times.“   Please have a look.

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