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Last month, Ernst & Young (a client of Pendry White) launched their Lessons from Change campaign, highlighting what had been learned by global companies as a consequence of the downturn. Their campaign does not rely on a review of the past but attempts to provide a snapshot of the future – a new future where the term ‘business as usual’ has lost its meaning.

This sparked our own debate within Pendry White about our lessons from change – how have we taken our experiences and those of our clients and adapted our business over the last 12-18 months? What are our top five lessons in the wake of the downturn?

1. Your people are your brand.

Whilst clients recognise that corporate reputation and brand image are essential platforms for success, they understand that, in difficult times, customers want to get back to basics and focus on core benefits and deliverables.

Against this backdrop, all our clients have been re-evaluating their activities, looking at how their brand can give greater meaning to their clients. This has meant looking at the customers’ experience end-to-end, instilling brand values at every touch point – from website to advertising to interaction with front and back office functions.

Rather than change brand messaging or values, they have been developing their people to ‘live the brand’ and build brand strength through service deliverables. We have been helping our clients link what they say that they do with what is actually being delivered. In doing this, they have been able to create greater alignment between brands and bottom-line.

2. If something works, work it hard.

For now, the ‘nice to haves’ are gone. Clients have been concentrating their efforts on techniques that have already proven their value. One of our clients found that they could generate brand awareness and new business development opportunities through a sustained advertising campaign in trade publications and have been able to negotiate better deals through increased commitment.

And it’s not just about what you do, it’s about how you do it – another of our clients found the roll-out of one campaign so successful that they are creating other business development campaigns around the same model. They are, in short, working what they know harder.

3. There is an increased drive for direct customer communication.

Marketing directors are looking for new low-cost and innovative ways to create a two-way dialogue between the company and their clients. They may not yet have mastered the new opportunities presented by the new social media platforms but they recognise the potential for trust-building and direct relationships. They know their customers have changed and they need to be able to respond.

To help our clients, we have been creating new products, such as Twitter Central and YouTube & You that enable mass communication and encourage quick two-way dialogue between a business and its clients – with low maintenance costs.

4. Greater cohesion is needed between marketing and sales.

As the emphasis has switched towards business development, clients have been re-aligning and re-integrating sales and marketing. This is truly bottom line stuff!

We have developed our own business development tool, SalesCapture, which we have been sharing with clients to help them pull sales and marketing together to form a highly targeted business development process. Our SalesCapture model creates a dynamic business development process that can adapt quickly to new information that is fed back from the sales team, such as competitor activity.

5. ‘ROI’ and ‘bottom-line’ are the new old buzz words.

When budgets are under pressure, marketing directors need to demonstrate value for money and how marketing activities contribute to revenues and profit margins.

We are very aware of this and have been introducing mechanisms into our clients’ projects that help marketing directors to demonstrate to their Board that a particular activity is worth investing in or diversifying into and shows how it can align with the bottom-line – it is, after all, in our interest too!

Like many companies, Pendry White has used the downturn as an opportunity to adapt our own business model and re-align our services with the changing needs of clients. We are incorporating the lessons we have learnt from the recession into our product and service delivery, viewing learning as a continuous process.

Business as usual may not have returned to the market just yet but a new marketing agenda is emerging – one where doing more with less is essential. By embracing our lessons from change, we are now well placed to grow with our clients and to add ever greater value to their and our bottom-line.