The annual Mendelsohn Affluent ($100K+)Survey is a consistently valuable tool for professional services marketers. Over 23 million fall into this sparkling category. Breaking down the groups further reveals three higher affluence subsets:—combined household incomes of (1) $250,000+ (2,525,000), (2) folks with $1 million+ in liquid/investable assets like CDs, stocks, bonds, mutual funds etc. (2,672,000) (3) and finally people who fall under both categories (1,029,000.)

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Two months ago you learned about the evolution of the brain and, we hope, got a taste of the power of the emotional brain to bring the rational brain to its knees. We need a bit more science to pull us along as we delve further into the efficacy of advertising (in which, you will remember, we want to include Web sites, collateral materials and other marketing efforts).

The amygdala and the hippocampus

If you flash your logo on a screen, it is registered in the hippocampus, part of the limbic system, which contributes to memory formation. But the hippocampus can only hold onto a few bits of information for short periods of time. To extend the memory, the hippocampus has to “talk” to the amygdala, which searches for and ultimately “matches” that immediate memory with other memories in its storehouse.

Let’s explain this again with an example: If you see a Coke can, your hippocampus holds that impression until it can match that impression (or “immediate memory”) with the taste and satisfaction of the contents of that can. The hippocampus, says Isobel Butcher, is like a “cloakroom attendant who receives your ‘stimulus ticket’—Coke logo and can—and matches it to the contents of the cloakroom in the amygdala—all other experiences you’ve ever had with Coke.

The amygdala winds up playing an incredibly important role in our lives. Match a past memory with a current stimulus and you get an immediate emotional response before a thinking response has time to even stumble awake. I picked up my gardening gloves on Saturday to find a harmless lizard had hidden itself underneath. I jumped three feet. I’m not embarrassed; I quickly determined the lizard to be harmless but I was out of harm’s way before the recognition of “lizard” crossed my mind. That’s the limbic brain stirred by the amygdala in response to the stimulus temporarily registered in the hippocampus. Got it?

It’s no leap at all to recognize that positive memories provoke similar instantaneous reactions in favor of a stimulus just as negative memories provoke fright and flight from a stimulus. All pre-conscious!!!

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There’s not much that gives management of professional service firms greater pain than reports of a potential recession or a prolonged unstable economy. Poor economic conditions quite often lead to uncertainty within firms, and the costs of marketing efforts are always an easy target of scrutiny. One thing is certain: the U.S. economy is in a funk. Inflation is on the horizon; the housing market has banks in turmoil; oil prices are hitting record highs; and the stock market is experiencing more ups, downs and corrections than a mountain road under repair. All of these issues only increase the fear that a recession might be around the corner and that the growing profits at professional service firms might be in danger of slipping after a long period of steady growth. As firms start preparing operational budgets for the coming year, discussions of belt-tightening are being heard in the halls once again.

Marketing 101 tells us that in times like these, the best prescription for an organization’s stability and success is to, at a minimum, stay the course. An even better course is to be aggressive and capture market share from those competitors that hunker down until the economy rebounds. Intellectually, this makes sense. However, convincing emotional shareholders not to take the conservative route in an effort to protect their cash flow is a bit more challenging.

So, what’s the answer? Although there is no survival guide for marketing during an economic downturn, there are some good remedies to help lessen the severity of recession jitters.

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