Good news lasts little. The Spanish stock market rose on Monday to its historical record, yesterday it stayed green and today it seems everything goes down again. Let’s hope it stabilizes a little so it stops dragging the banks towards a drift and with them the employers. Otherwise only those with the best strategy and tactics will hold.

Carles Torrecilla, Marketing professor of ESADE Business School and a specialist in strategic marketing and Start-ups, gave some keys on how to survive during a seminar organized last week by ACC1Ó in Tarragona. According to him, all companies should offer their customers three types of products and above all treat them with the same importance:

- STRUCTURE products: they give little profit, but they are constant (like bread). Let’s say they are bought by the grandmother, for example.
- PROFIT products: they give a lot of profit, but the sale is more sporadic (like the Iberian ham); the typical customer is the man who has lots of money and wants to spend it well.
- IMAGE Products: are sold very sporadically by because of its name noun (a good French cheese bought by an artist because he is giving a dinner to celebrate he has sold a lot of paintings and it’s important to show of)

And than crisis comes: the rich customer is being too busy attempting not to lose money at the stock market and stopped going to the store. The artist does not sell so many paintings any more, so he does not organize special dinners… However, the grandma continues needing her bread every day. But as that shopkeeper ill-treated her, because he gave priority to the “high class man” of the Iberian jam, she has decided to go to next door’s shop. The market of structure has to be worked, because in crisis time it is the one that pays the bills. The market that grows is the middle class and now that the banks are not so receptive to give loans for cars or houses, part of the rent (which had to be invested) comes off free for consumption, because saving is not our strong point around here.

A simple analysis, the one of Carles Torrecilla, but very illustrative. At ExploraTgn.cat we go well. We work for the families. People like us, that want to pass a good weekend with the children but without having to pass hunger the rest of the month.

This entry was posted on October 15th, 2008 at 21:39 and is filed under L’estratègia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.