Johnny Molson: A recent article that I wrote is called Say This. Not That. And you can find it on the Wizard of Ads blog site. And in it I’m talking about what businesses should say and shouldn’t say right now. A lot of businesses feel this need to talk about coronavirus and that they understand that you’re stressed and we’re stressed. And here’s how we’re changing things for you. And you’re seeing and hearing a lot of those kinds of ads. And what I wrote about was that just because the other businesses are doing that doesn’t mean that every other business should be doing it, too. And in fact, if your customers aren’t asking about it, you’re probably answering a question that they’re not even asking.

So how do you turn that in a way that doesn’t ignore the realities of what’s going on, but talks more about the benefits that you are presenting to your customers? And I encouraged people to write in if they had any questions about the messages they were currently putting out there. I’d give them some thoughts on how they can change it around a little bit.

I got a letter from Jennifer from Lazer Autobody. She wrote, “We’re an auto body shop and considered an essential business and really want to service our customers and keep our employees employed. I’ve attached our commercial and the voices of one of the owners. We did address the issue of COVID-19, but didn’t want to go doom and gloom. Thanks for taking a listen.” All right. Here’s the ad.

The following commercial is the property of Rawlco Radio.

Bradon here with Lazer Autobody. In these uncertain time, things can feel overwhelming and if you’ve been in an accident, you want answers fast. SGI is no longer providing estimates. However, being an essential service, you can still bring your vehicle to Lazer Autobody. We’ve taken extreme measures to ensure the health and safety of all our staff and customers. We are able to provide you with a safe no contact estimate as well as vehicle pickup and delivery. Because when times are tough, we want to make choosing an autobody shop as easy as possible. Laser Autobody. Your SGI elite autobody team on Avenue P South.

You know, for all practical purposes, there’s nothing wrong with this ad and it’s not gonna hurt anything to do this. But what jumped out at me is that one of the biggest benefits that your company is offering is at the bottom of the ad. Journalists sometimes call that burying the lede.

You’re offering free pickup and delivery. That’s really cool. Even when things aren’t crazy out right now, you know, even if people aren’t locked in their house, what a cool thing to offer your customers. So why not start there? Here’s how I kind of turned it around. It’s really just a matter of rearranging the order. So start like this.

This is Braden with Lazer Autobody. If you’ve been in an accident, you want answers fast. That’s why we’ll pick up and drop off your car for FREE. Then we’ll give you our customized no contact estimate. Your car is essential to you… and we’ll make sure you’re back on the road quickly and safely and then go on with. Our staff has been trained taking extra measures for your health and safety. Etc etc etc.

And you can really remove the “In these uncertain times. I’m stressed. Your stressed. Everybody’s uncertain.” Stuff you don’t really need to know. People really already do know that they’re stressed and they know that these are unprecedented times. And you don’t really have to reiterate that. What you do need to do is answer the question of how you’re going to help me. OK. I know you’re open because you’re advertising. Now tell me how I can do business with you. And to say “We’re going to come to your house. We’ll pick up your car. We’ll take it back to the shop, fix it and then drop it back off to you,” is an amazing convenience, like I said, even if the world weren’t all upside down now. Jennifer, thanks for writing in. And if there’s anything that I can help you with write to me at Johnny@wizardofads.com

Let’s get on with the roundtable. Today in Tucson, Dave Young is going to get you to think about pivots you can make right now to get you through this very unusual episode that we’re all in. And in Toronto, Mick Torbay looks at past downturns in the economy and what we can learn from those experiences and apply them today. I’m Johnny Molson in Springfield, Illinois. We’re going to start with Dave Young today, talking about the importance of leadership right now in your business.

Dave Young: I think leadership means you stay on top of things. And you try to have perspective and make sure that you’re not just spouting the opinions that you’re reading from whatever pundit that is the sole source of your news.

Johnny Molson: How should a leader then keep himself and his or her company calm?

Dave Young: A lot of it is just being transparent. If you don’t know something, when you say “We don’t know and we’re gonna get through this together,” that tells people that you’re at least honest about it and you’re communicating what you do know, and you have a plan. I read just a short little book on Eisenhower and leadership that a local guy here in Tucson wrote. And I love the quote from Eisenhower, and I’m not going to get the quote right. But he often said that he hates plans. But he finds the act of planning to be invaluable. And so I think this has caught us all a little bit without much of a plan.

Johnny Molson: I think you’re on to something there. I mean, in a lot of ways we are in such uncharted territory. You can plan to your heart’s desire, but this is pretty unprecedented. And I want to bring Mick in up in Toronto. Because you had talked about how so many businesses are in panic mode right now and some maybe should be panicking. But a lot probably shouldn’t. Well, look, let’s get the bad news out of the way. Who should be panicking?

Mick Torbay: Well, there are definitely going to be some businesses that are going to suffer more than others. And I’m going to say some things that we might consider offensive. I’m just going to consider this a safe space. I’m going to speak what’s on my mind and I’m going to risk offending people. But there are going to be some businesses that will disproportionately lose because of what’s going on.

If we acknowledge that there are going to be some businesses that lose. Then that also means there have to be some businesses that win. And that’s the offensive part. The part where we acknowledge that maybe there could be an opportunity here for some businesses to consider this a time of opportunities is the offensive part. But I’m going to acknowledge it because it’s true.

And where this comes from is that in my experience, when businesses switch positions, when the number five business becomes number two, when number three becomes number one and when number one becomes number four. Those times are almost always in bad times, rough times, challenging times, times like this. When things are going well. Everybody just kind of moves up and we just kind of grow and everybody kind of grows together. And there are no big changes. There are no big switches, so nobody makes a big leap.

In times like this, and I’m 50 years old, so my best attempt to create a template for this would be September 11th. That was the last time there was a big thing that drastically affected businesses. And that was the time that we realized just how hand-to-mouth some businesses were. The fact that a couple of airlines went out of business two days later because they literally could not continue operating because they didn’t have more than two days worth of operating capital. So that’s when these big changes occur. You have entire industries that have big players that disappear. But when we see that there’s a possibility that someone could lose, that means someone could gain that top position that they couldn’t do in good times.

Johnny Molson: It’s a law of marketing and I don’t think that it’s terribly — while yes, I agree it sounds distasteful to be talking about using this as an opportunity — it’s just that it’s a function of when there is less sound in the marketplace… When your competitors start to disappear, which may very well happen here in a lot of industries, that you inevitably have more of an opportunity.

Mick Torbay: Well, I liken this to a race. We’re in a car race and we’re all trying to win. And there’s somebody in front and someone behind that person, and someone behind that person, and we’re all racing. We all want to win, we all want to pull ahead. We all want to take that leadership position. And what happens when these terrible crises happens is that there’s a very natural instinct to put the brakes on. And when I say put the brakes on, what I mean is switch off your marketing. Stop, just stop.

And I liken that to all of your competitors who are racing with you are all putting their brakes on. Now, the safest time for you to put the brakes on is when everybody else is putting the brakes on, so I get it. I understand why that instinct is there to say “Everyone else is slamming on their brakes, I’d better slam the brakes on, too.” On the other hand, this is still a race, right? Like we have to acknowledge that it’s always been a race. It is still a race. And this race is continuing. And this race will continue regardless of this terrible thing that’s happened to us. And so to me, it seems so obvious when everybody else is putting their brakes on, just leave your foot on the gas.

So let’s go back to 9/11, because that’s that’s the closest thing I can use as a template for this. If you remember 9/11 for about a month and a half after the incidents of that day, people stopped buying cars. And the reason why we all stopped buying cars is because although now we know it was an incident — it happened one day and then it was over — back then, we didn’t realize that for all we knew, that was the first of many attacks. And so we stop making big purchases.

But I mentioned this at the time and I think it’s relevant. Although we stopped buying cars, we were still consuming cars at the same rate we always were, we were still going to work. We were still doing our shopping and the cars were still deteriorating in our driveways. Because whether or not you use a car, in fact, the entropy kicks in. And I remember at the time thinking we’re still consuming cars at the same rate. We’re just not buying them. Which means to me there has to be a reconciliation of that. And when that reconciliation comes, it doesn’t come in a measurable way. It’s not like just two months later, where everybody would buy twice as many cars? You go, “Oh, well, that’s the correction.” Some people put off their car buying for two months. Some people put it off for six. Some people put if off for a year. There wasn’t that obvious correction.

And yet, if you look at a 20 year span from 1990 to 2010, we consumed and purchased 20 years of cars. There wasn’t a lost opportunity, so for those businesses that are in the business of something that is consumed. You’re actually not in as much danger as you might think. You’re in pain, but you’re not in danger. If you are in the air conditioning business, you are still consuming air conditioning products at the exact same rate you’ve always been consuming them. If you are in the roofing business, you are still consuming roofs at the same rate you have always consumed them.

Johnny Molson: Dave, as marketers a lot of time we are looking to the future. You know, we’re not necessarily — with the exception of an event or a vacation or something — necessarily a “right-now” thing. As you look to the future and you had mentioned how important leadership is. How do you then give your customers and your employees confidence to know that you’re stable and it’s safe and we’ll be here on the other side of this?

Dave Young: I think one of the things, you know, where I’ve seen planning — there’s planning and then there’s pivoting. You know, the Waffle House index has been used by FEMA for a long time. It’s “Code Red is the Waffle House is closed.” But if it’s green, it’s that they’ve still got power. They’re typically talking about hurricane situations, right. And we all have an understanding of a hurricane is really, really bad for a short period of time. And then it’s uncovering yourselves and fixing a lot of damage and finding people and rescuing people. But then it’s sunny skies again. And, you know, we we’ve got construction jobs and roofing jobs and displaced people. And we know how to handle those kinds of things.

Yellow level for a Waffle House is no power, they’ve only got generator power, but they stay in business. And then level red, which is where they’re at now, I mean, the Waffle House is here closed and they’re not doing takeout. They’re not doing delivery. A lot of their restaurants have closed. And I don’t think they anticipated this kind of thing. It’s like, “Oh, well, we can run a Waffle House as long as we have power.” And that’s just not the case right now.

You also have to have the ability to maybe do a little pivot. I saw a story — it wasn’t even a story, it was just somebody shared a page from Red Roof Inn’s website. And we think, “Oh, gosh, vacations and hospitality…” And somebody at Red Roof said, “Let’s try something,” right. We need to try something. And what they’re doing is they’re renting their rooms during the day for $29. If you need a place to do your office thing where you’re not with a whole bunch of other people. That would keep some of those hospitality people employed who would keep the doors open. I don’t know how they’re doing with it, but I like pivots like that where you can say, “Well, this is the business that we are in, but that doesn’t work now. And so what can we do with the resources that we have to serve? To serve the people that we do have?”

One other quick story. I learned this last night. We were supposed to be in New York this weekend. We’re recording on April 3rd, and my whole family was gonna be gathered in Brooklyn for our youngest daughter’s wedding, which was going to be tomorrow. And it still may be. They’re trying to work that out and sneak off to the park and meet an officiant and a couple of witnesses who will bring their own pens to sign the papers. But the hotel that we were supposed to stay at, I called them to see if there was any possibility of moving or doing anything else. They said, “Well, I don’t work for the hotel. I’m answering the phone because the hotel has been converted into housing for first responders right now.” So that’s a hotel in downtown Brooklyn that’s serving another purpose of keeping those people from going home with whatever they pick up during the day.

So I think it’s just finding a way to pivot into something that you can take your resources, your people, what are they good at and what can we do to serve people, continue to serve them in a time when things are all just upside-down.

Johnny Molson: You both bring up timelines and then that is the big unknown that everybody has right now. And I think, you look at 9/11 and yeah, Mick is right. Initially, we had no idea what this was going to be, but in a few days we knew where we were. When you look at 2008, 2009, that was a case where we knew it was bad and we didn’t know where the bottom was. And so there was no, you know, there was no understanding of a timeline. There’s similarities from both of those scenarios here. Because we know like 9/11, we know, “OK, it’s kind of behind us now. And now we rebuild.” But unlike 2008, we know there is an end, we just don’t know when the end is. And what that looks like when we come out the other end.

Mick Torbay: And that is obviously the challenge. And what I need to remind everyone is that what’s causing the economic panic is panic. The reason why we’re not buying things. The reason why we’re not behaving normally is because we’re panicked. But what we have to remember is that you cannot be panicked permanently. It’s simply not possible regardless of the circumstances. Things will become normal. And by the way, that works on the good side and the bad side. And the best example of this is the Blitz. Like there was a point where for literally years people in London would make their cup of tea, go to work during the day, come home, have tea, make dinner, pack up the sleeping bags, walk over to the local tube station, go down the stairs, sit down by the tracks, sing some songs, share some cookies, listen to the sounds of the bombs hitting London and then go to sleep. And then in the morning they’d wake up and they’d pack up their sleeping bags, go back up the stairs, go home, put that stuff away, put the kettle on, go to work. You actually can’t stay panicked permanently. You eventually have to turn this into normal, and part of normal is resuming the things that you do that make your life normal. And a lot of those things are the things that our clients provide.

Johnny Molson: May not be the normal we want, but it’s the normal we’ve got.

Mick Torbay: It’s gonna be some kind of normal. And and we can’t hold out on doing the things that bring us pleasure forever. And that is the light at the end of the tunnel. The only question in my mind is that when we resume that when we start buying things again — because we’re talking about we’re talking about the economy, you’re talking of money changing hands. The question is going to be — when we begin, when money starts moving again, when it goes from person A to person, B, when the economy’s engine starts rolling — the question is going to be “When I start spending money, where do I spend it? Who do I spend it with? Who do I remember? Who’s on my mind? Who did I choose? Who do I think of first and like the best?”

Johnny Molson: Yeah, and that’s a clarion call for not taking your foot off the gas in the example that you had given with the understanding and the sensitivity that, you know, you’ve got to take care of your family first. And I think we all get it. If you’ve got to pull back — do what you gotta do to take care of yourself.

Mick Torbay: Absolutely, Johnny. I mean, understand that everything I’m saying does not apply to the business that is hand-to-mouth.

Johnny Molson: Right.

Mick Torbay: I mean, you know, for that airline that only has 24 hours of operating capital, you’re in trouble. For the business that is not in the position where they are absolutely 100 percent hand-to-mouth: dare to see this as an opportunity when everybody else is taking their foot off gas.

Johnny Molson: If you have any questions or ways that we might be able to help you out, put it in the comments of the YouTube video. Or you can write directly to one of the wizards you saw in today’s episode.

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