Marketing personnel, advertising agencies and clients are all debating whether to hunker down or continue marketing during the current business climate. Typically, marketing budgets are cut during tight times, when the opposite is the best answer for business success.

This is not the time to cut. We have seen documentation that dates to the 1920’s, showing how advertisers can gain marketshare during downturns and do it at a lower cost. These companies can also solidify their existing client base and build equity while treating marketing as an investment. NW Ayer Inc’s report, Advertising During a Recession: Key Issues and Opportunites published in 1991, offers some excellent research.

One example, quoted by Wall Street analysts, attributes the 1975 slide of Avon Products and Hershey Foods at least in part to advertising cuts, and credits heavier advertising for the improved performance of Philip Morris and Revlon during the same period.

But most businesses are not the behemoths like Revlon and Philip Morris. This makes it even more important to keep marketing in tough times. Smaller businesses may have a protected market niche or may be able to reduce expenses quicker. Smaller businesses can also innovate products and services faster to meet whatever needs they do find in the customer base.

A recent Forrester Report on Interactive Marketing mirrors the old research and takes it a step farther – now looking at social media. Josh Bernoff opines that measurable efforts may be ok during a downturn and that social applications may actually thrive.

Jaap Favier, Vice President, Research Director, Forrester Research Recession, takes it farther and is shown here describing how it will involve firms responding to the change in consumers core needs by acting more like your neighborhood bar.

We all understand that 2009 will be historic. The U.S. will seat our first President of African-American descent. The economic fallout from the housing debacle will continue to unwind and will effect companies large and small. Perhaps Congress will apologize for pushing home ownership in the 1980’s and 90’s and will flood the markets with dollars for individuals instead. Manufacturers will struggle to get their costs lower for everything. Labor and benefits will be among those hardest hit. Unemployment will be at the highest level in decades. Financial firms will be very intentional with loans to businesses and consumers. And consumers will be (hopefully) more frugal with their dollars – maybe getting back to the fiscal common sense of the 1940’s and 50’s.

Through all of these troublesome lens – businesses must try to improve and move forward. We have had a decade of companies moving white collar jobs offshore, but what else can they do to lower costs and/or increase sales? What common sense should be applied to businesses?

At Vialogix we believe a key place to start is your web site.

Your web site is the first place most people get an impression of your company. That impression can be true to your way of doing business or it can be false. What unique characteristics does your product or service offer potential customers that they see as a differentiating factor in their choice of vendors? Do you sell based on quality? or price? or quantity? or service? or some uniqueness that only you can deliver? Does your site demonstrate that and allow customers to clearly understand it in a matter of seconds?

Question: What should your web site be doing in today’s economy?

Answer: Assisting your customers in the easiest way possible.

Simplicity works online. In fact it works for all technology. One of the funniest talks I ever heard on simplicity was by David Pogue who tests cool new technology every day for the New York Times and CBS News. His humor shows our true dependence on technology today and how we would prefer EASY or SIMPLE if we could get it in everything.

The majority of our corporate clients use their web site as a cheap delivery channel. They have organized their product or service areas into groups that control their own web presence. They have dedicated the resources to purchasing and completing projects to update their sites with the latest data cacheing software or content management tools or search engine optimization or templating frameworks. They have made sure their infrastructure scales and is redundant and is backed up for quick recovery from a catastrophic incident.

But there is one area where the vast majority of all web sites still lacks credibility – the ease with which customers can do business with the company. The user interface can cost your business lost sales if it is hard to understand. Jakob Nielsen has been saying it for years, but bad design costs businesses money

So resolve to return some common sense into your 2009 web projects. Simplify the part your customers see and you will reap the rewards – no matter the times.

We run into sales opportunities frequently who have no idea of the realistic cost of bad design. These business leaders have done cheap business cards or used family members who had some HTML skill and are left with the impression that web site redesign should be a quick turn project for minimum expense. Many of these businesses treat design as if it were a commodity – when it fact it is one of the few things left that should not be.

With apologies to Yogi, 2008 is starting out with a lot of discussion about Usability and User Interface.

This has been a trend in software design and web development for the last 2 decades, but today you can’t read about a product that doesn’t have some simplified user interface. This year’s International CES in Las Vegas is showing off thousands of new gadgets and all the marketing language seems to have a common theme “Ease of Use.” I found it interesting that prior to the show, the VP of Communications discussed how important Content is to all consumers.

We have very low quality video from 1993 of me saying almost the same thing.

Manufacturers are all in the ‘usability’ game today with new releases of products that differentiate their products. Check out a few recent product announcements from:

JVC as their “Everio hard disk camcorders offer enhanced usability in a colorful lineup for 2008.”

Samsung has this user friendly language in a recent press release “Whereas previous versions of MagicNet offered a simpler User Interface, MagicNet Pro is equipped with a professional, multi document User Interface, which offers enhanced flexibility and ease-of use for the network operator. Furthermore, MagicNet Pro offers a highly-customizable user experience, allowing operators to control the content and design of several designated areas. The upgraded MagicNet Pro system also offers two types of network connections: auto connection, within an easy-to-use sub-network and direct WAN connection.”

SONY rolled out improved versions of their Bravia flat panels with “slim bezels and thin depth, along with Sony’s new 3D graphic user interface.” And about 4 scrolling pages of features and specifications ;-)

Magellan is aiming to make GPS navigation as easy as Amazon’s “one-click” purchase.

So what does it mean?

It means that EVERYTHING should be easy to use. Start 2008 with your online experiences.

You would have been asleep at the wheel over the past few years if you haven’t heard how Web 2.0 ideas have engaged individuals and consumers with cool new possibilities. But the Web 2.0 moniker is still undefined to many corporate clients. What does it mean to their business?

The web has moved forward from Hypertext to a more rich ability to share information. Michael Wesch, a professor at Kansas State, made this great video that demonstrates the transition from text to Web 2.0. It is worth the 5 minutes of history if you haven’t already seen it.

Social networking, blogs, wiki’s, RSS, widgets and mashups have been all the rage on sites created by individuals. Facebook, MySpace, Googlemaps even personal pages from Apple generated tremendous media coverage as personal publishing took center stage in the ‘always on’ internet space.

The beginning of the year is a good time to rethink everything from personal finances to the extra stuff in your closets to your business plan. I looked at many of those things thinking through possible ‘resolutions’ for 2007.

There is growing evidence that visualization and “the way things look” effects all we do – especially now that we get a majority of our information through a computer screen. My wife has not been a heavy internet user, but she spent December researching her next vehicle using Edmunds.com and Consumer Reports info mixed in with manufacturers sites and actual test drives. She liked certain sites and hated others – because they made it easy to understand a lot of data about new automobiles. When it came time to decide – she was armed with more information than ever before and when her car arrives later this month I expect there will be no cognitive dissonance about the purchase.

Internet usage continues to grow at an unprecedented rate and people are actually choosing the usefulness – not just the self-publishing (MySpace, Facebook) and time-wasting (YouTube) features.

I’ve been carrying around the October Fast Company magazine for 2 months because of all the great articles in their third annual Masters of Design issue. The stories about brands like Puma are insightful, but the bigger picture is more important – Design matters in business again.

Retailers have shown us the lead in recent years as even Target and Walmart have pushed ‘brands’ over ‘value.’ Don’t get me wrong, they still have great value, but the empty big box stores across the suburban countryside, tell us that the 90’s are over and the bland version of the value story doesn’t sell long term.

World Usability Day is today reminding us all that the user interface IS the most important aspect of application and web development. This year the Usability Professionals’ Association is sponsoring 218 events around the world in 40 countries.

People are buying more online every year and annual ecommerce is expected to top $200 billion for 2006. And Forrester predicts that holiday sales will top $27 billion. With all those potential online dollars, are you doing the right things to improve your online sales?

Vialogix has long held that the user experience improves ecommerce (Creatas, Picturequest, Hinrichs case study examples). Recent collaboration between Akamai and JupiterResearch shows that the average time an online customer will wait is 4 seconds! More than one-third of shoppers will abandon the site with a poor experience. And 75% were not likely to ever shop on that site again! Those are pretty hefty penalties for bad design.

We recently helped Haley & Aldrich launch a redesigned web site for their October sponsorship of Pop!Tech. Company CEO Bruce Beverly and COO Larry Smith got great coverage in the November print edition of FastCompany magazine which can now be found online here.