Never waste a crisis.
It works for everyone who is game enough to try it. Just ask the rabbits. The last census of rabbits put their numbers at around 150 million.
Nothing we have even done has been able to wipe them out.
My good friend Louise who knows about these things, but poor thing lives in the city, said to me the other day “Rabbits, I thought we wiped them out in the 50’s with that Myxo stuff ”.
Well we thought we did Louise. Scientists invented Myxomatosis to eradicate them from the landscape. A crisis for the rabbits!
They were all supposed to die, but they didn’t. They worked out how to overcome the threat - the bigger and better rabbits survived to breed on, and on, and on.
During the next fifty years we tried to wipe them out with new scientific discoveries. After Myxo in the ‘50’s there was the Calicivirus in the 90’s not to mention a century of shooting, bating, ferreting, trapping and of course the rabbit proof fence. All useless.
The latest I heard this week was that in the suburbs of Canberra at the foot of Mt Ainslie they have created a new crisis for the rabbits (and the residents) by gassing them in their burrows with phosphine gas. They obviously haven’t heard of ferrets which would do the same thing but much cheaper. Killing off families of rabbits - I wonder where Senator Fielding stands on this one.
Each time there has been crisis for the rabbits they have survived and continued breeding. But why am I telling you about the rabbits? It’s because the world is in the biggest financial crisis in 80 years and the rabbits can teach us something. The rabbits that were the strongest and the smartest survived to be bigger rabbits than ever before. This column is about marketing and the media and so it is the brands and services that build and grow now when media rates are lower and their competitors down and out, that lay the base for the better times ahead, as Charlie told us last week in this column.
Look at what people like Woolworths are doing and you will see how it works.
Elsewhere, the AFL is planning moves into foreign lands for them like the western suburbs of Sydney: classical anti cyclical strategy that will be a winner.
The big four Australian banks are on the march doing the same thing turning this crisis into an opportunity. So is Kerry Stokes and the Seven Network. And the list goes on.
I built our business in the mid seventies out of the world oil crisis, galloping inflation and troubles everywhere. Gough had just been sacked, the country was in crisis and confidence was rock bottom – I must have been mad. But in fact what was happening was advertising agency cutbacks aimed at our competitors at the time and they weren’t looking for any new competitors like us.
Politically John Howard has us shown how to turn a crisis into a victory on a number of occasions. Twice leader of the Liberals and twice dropped, he fought back and became PM. And then he was confronted with the massacre of Port Arthur. It was that crisis that brought him the admiration of the Australian people that hadn’t wanted to know him for the 20 years before.
George Bush was getting nowhere as President in 2001as September 11 arrived: a crisis to be embraced and it was the making of is Presidency.
So think of your own circumstances because this is one of the best times to build for the future. And if there needed to be a final word on the subject, just look at South Sydney - the Rabbitohs on 14 March this year had their best win in 29 years.
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