As the 2nd quarter draws to a close, I have the distinct feeling of what the great American football coach Yogi Berra called deja vu all over again.  The business owners I work with report that this quarter has been more like last year than the first quarter was - things seemed to slow down ahead of the budget and don't seem to have picked up.

I think we have to work on the basis that this is what things are going to be like for a while.  This is what slow growth looks like.  I call it a soggy recovery (not a term you'll see economists adopt any time soon).  I'm probably being conditioned by all the rain we've had and the state of my lawn, but I see a lot of businesses having invested in growth strategies such as renewed advertising, additional sales and marketing resources and generally trying to get out and about a bit more.  But to date, progress and results have been slow in coming.

There are a number of points to make here.  First, we're in a post-boom, post-doom environment.  What worked for us in both of those phases won't work for us now.  Perhaps markets are not quite so price-driven as they were in 2008/09, but they are far from being feature or status driven like they were in the boom.  So we have to come up with offers that reflect the preferences of our A class customers as they stand today.  

The second point is that I don't think many of us have taken the time to go back to our marketing plan and really refresh it.  To some extent it's become a bit of a forgotten art.  In retrospect we didn't have to think about it too much during the boom and during the depths of the recession the focus was on reducing costs and holding on to as much of the top line as possible.

I've just been through the exercise myself, and it's been a real challenge to let go of some of the comfortable assumptions I had about my market, and to let go of my attachment to some of my pets that no longer serve the business or that don't fit as well as I would like them to.  Some core things were re-affirmed, including the need to focus on core products but repackage and reposition them.  And in re-affirming some things I already knew, I have invested new energy and purpose into the old strategies.

The final point is that when we make investments in marketing in this kind of environment, results are not going to be instant.  There is a lag between flooring the accelerator and the turbo kicking in.  We have to be patient, disciplined and focused.  And we have to believe that if we keep doing the right things, practicing new and better behaviours, and pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone, we will prevail.  It's only a question of when, not if.