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B2C Approaches 101

rooms, they were offering rooms free of charge with addi-
tional coupons given at check-in for dining and entertain-
ment. Most, if not all, of their pricing strategies were not
developed toward such a depth of economic downturn.
Typically, in prosperous economies the casinos would be
brimming full of people with little room to walk through
them. At the bottom of the recession, they were only scat-
tered people through most of the casinos.

Part of the resistance to planning for different economic
scenarios is that people as human beings don’t like to think
about worst-case scenarios. It is important for businesses to
work through this to make pricing strategies for every type
of economy – before they actually happen.

Addressing media created buying anxiety

For the most part, the Canadian financial institutions weather
global economic downturns quite well because of Canada’s
regulation. In the last downturn, the Canadian media was
creating the public sentiment that lending in Canada had
significantly decreased. The reality is that the lending by
banks in Canada was still as close to the relative capacity as
it was before the downturn. Yet consumers were under the
impression that lending practices have created a significantly
tighter lending environment. As the saying goes, “perception
is reality”. This consumer perception had a noticeable impact
on the volume of lending that a Canadian bank was booking.
The local branches had to make a concerted effort to dispel
this untruth with facts. This is a relatively common phenom-
enon when an economy transitions from prosperity to retrac-
tion. What sells media is bad news. This is why there needs
to be a proactive effort on any business’s agenda to explicitly
address the media’s tendency to paint a darker picture than
reality.