Bang for buck

Selina Denman, Editor

The age of unruly, irresponsible spending has pretty much passed. We’ve entered the year of the tightened purse strings, a year where caution will abound and reckless over-indulgence will be replaced by intelligent, considered investment. It’s the year where better bang for buck will be demanded as a norm rather than an exception.
 
It’s not that spending will stop altogether, its just that consumers, from your high-end specifier to your housewife in Spinneys, need to be assured that their cash is being effectively allocated.

Smart businesses are responding accordingly. Instead of slamming on the brakes and waiting nervously for the rest of the industry to take the lead, they are amping up investment in marketing, research and development, beefing up their product lines and focusing on improving the quality of their offering.

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They have realised that now is not the time to loiter at the back of the classroom; it’s the time to show strength and offer value. 

Last month, two big names in the sanitaryware sector invited some 1,500 global business partners and members of the media to join them in the Black Forest for an exclusive unveiling of their latest product lines (more on p.14&15).

“This is big effort for a medium-sized company like ours,” noted Franz Kook, CEO of Duravit. “But, in the current situation, it is an important signal. It is only by going the extra mile that we can do good business, especially in this climate. We are focusing on added value, and on new levels of quality. We have not slowed down our spending on product development but, rather, accelerated it.”

What Duravit knows is that those that spend wisely will prosper in these tricky times. That there is true value in effective, highly-targeted marketing efforts, more now than ever before.

The secret is to stay visible... at least according to the people that we interviewed for this month’s Industry Speak , where we questioned the value of trade shows in the current economic climate. Now is the time to be seen, they insisted. The alternative carries a far higher cost.