Global marketer Andrew Lark used a racing analogy to check how freight corporations can survive and even grow their businesses during a recession by specializing in customer experience and marketing.
“There’s an important quote that I actually love that claims the very best operators — and lots of of you’re the very best operators — know win on a wet track and it’s a wet track on the market, however it’s pretty easy to win on a dry track,” said Lark during his keynote address at FreightWaves’ Way forward for Supply Chain event in Cleveland on Thursday.
“We all the time sit and take a look at the present condition and go, ‘Oh, my God, it’s never been this nuts,’ but then people who are old and drained and exhausted like me remember, ‘Yeah, actually there was that Iraq War and there was one other war before that after which there was one other recession,’” Lark said. “We’ve been through this before.”
As an investor, adviser, mentor and founding father of multiple startups, Lark chairs Group Lark, a world consultancy that helps corporations survive and thrive during difficult times when the markets take a sudden turn.
He’s also one among the authors of the international bestselling book, “The Augmented Age: Life within the Smart Lane.” The book is in regards to the rising use of artificial intelligence.
Lark, a native of Auckland, Recent Zealand, advises corporations to not cancel their marketing budgets during a recession but to judge how that marketing money is being spent and the way much of the budget “actually touches a customer.”
“You may have to have a look at the ratio in your corporation and go, ‘If I’m putting $100 into marketing and only $10 is viewed, there’s something fundamentally fallacious.’ In my businesses, we goal a minimum of fifty% of all spend needs to be viewable,” Lark said.
“Marketers make for pretty soft targets in terms of budgets,” he said. “But spend is a big issue in marketing.”
Lark added, “The truth today is business-to-business marketers spend roughly 92% of their budgets chasing 5% of their customers out there.”
As a substitute of investing extra money in SEO, deal with using existing customers as a income, he said.
“Find customers who love [your business] and get them to introduce [you] to other customers,” Lark said.
He said the availability chain is a fundamental differentiator in creating customer experience.
“Don’t consider yourselves as shippers, as freighters, as pallet orchestrators. Consider yourselves as a fundamental component in delivering customer experience,” Lark said. “I might argue that one among the most important breakpoints today in customer experience is what you do.”