Person

Principles

Problems

Perspicacity

Steve whispers the word “recession” in a dark alley at the top of this episode. David laughs. Then they get serious. Consumer confidence in the US is currently at its lowest since records began in 1952, lower than during the Cuban Missile Crisis. That context shapes everything Steve and David unpack here, drawing on Mike Michalowicz’s book The Recession Response, written in 2020 and, as it turns out, very much written for right now.

They walk through the five stages of a recession response, apply Michalowicz’s business hierarchy of needs to the decisions you are facing today, dissect a fear-based marketing email targeting allied health practitioners, and dust off a 1977 General Motors ad that tried very hard to convince anxious petrol buyers that a massive car was actually quite sensible.

Get ready to take notes.

Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes

02:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.
The Five Stages (And Why Knowing Them Restores Your Agency)

There is a word that makes grown adults freeze. This episode names it.

Mike Michalowicz wrote The Recession Response in 2020 as COVID hit and financial markets groaned. It runs just over two hours as an audiobook. That brevity is deliberate. He knew that a business owner in shock would not wade through a 400-page tome. The book is short because it had to be, and it works for exactly the same reason.

His framework mirrors grief, applied at a societal level. Stage one is shock: businesses freeze, decisions get delayed, and the most dangerous thing of all happens: nothing. Stage two is retreat, where costs get cut, often including the marketing that was quietly keeping the pipeline alive. Stage three is adaptation, where businesses reassess what customers actually need right now and direct engagement becomes critical. Stage four is re-emergence, stabilisation, then controlled growth. Stage five is thriving: expanding, capturing market share, outperforming the competitors who never moved past retreat.

David raises a striking piece of context. US consumer sentiment data goes back to 1952. The current numbers are the lowest on record, lower even than during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Steve shares his FED System: Fish Every Day. A simple discipline of contacting one existing client or contact daily, not to sell, just to connect. It sounds almost too simple. It is also, Steve admits, easy to let slide when you’re busy. David adds a story from the 1987 crash: a colleague of his father’s arrived at the dinner table the week after, ready to buy a transport company, numbers probably solid, looking for partners. He misread the room entirely. The people he needed were still in shock. He came across as brash and self-serving. The deal never happened. The lesson: you cannot move people forward until you meet them where they are psychologically.

15:00 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.
The Business Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow had a pyramid. Michalowicz built one for your business.

Most people are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: physical survival at the base, safety above that, then belonging, then esteem, then self-actualisation at the top. The rule is simple: whatever the lowest unsatisfied level is, that is where your energy goes. Michalowicz applies the same logic to business, and David’s observation is apt: this model works whether there is a recession or not.

The five levels, base to peak: sales (survival and cash flow), profit (financial resilience), order (systems and processes), impact (brand, loyalty and market presence), and legacy (the business outlasting the owner). Two questions drive the diagnostic. Do we have sales? If yes, do we have enough sales to generate profit? If the answer to either is no, that is where the work goes: not on branding, not on systems, not on anything higher up the hierarchy.

Michalowicz’s starkest warning is about debt. Do not borrow money simply because it is available. If the business cannot grow sales and profitability with existing structures, adding repayment obligations makes the next stage harder, not easier. Steve closes this segment with a useful provocation from Stephen Covey: managers find the most efficient way to climb the ladder, but leaders check that the ladder is against the right wall. Michalowicz offers a grounding exercise to find your wall: draw a circle marked A on a blank page, draw three arrows outward, then place a circle marked B in the corner representing where you want to go. Are any of your arrows pointing at B? In uncertain times, the temptation is to move anywhere to escape discomfort. Moving without direction is costly.

26:45 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.
When Fear-Based Marketing Targets Your Inbox

Recessionary times bring out the opportunists.

Steve shares an email received by a client in the allied health field. The subject line: Why your clinic isn’t showing up when patients search for you. Written with confident authority. Entirely untailored. Almost certainly generated by AI. The classic structure: assert a frightening problem, imply the reader is falling behind, offer a paid workshop as the cure.

Steve ran the email through Google’s Gemini and shared the assessment with his client. Four things stood out. The claim that one in three patients uses AI search draws on broad global surveys of early tech adopters, not the reality of a specialist vestibular clinic in Adelaide. AI visibility is largely a matter of good SEO: schema markup and authoritative content, things a well-managed site is likely already doing. The promise of ten new patients per day would operationally overwhelm a boutique specialist practice, which tells you the sender never actually looked at the business. And deploying Seth Godin’s Purple Cow, published in 2003, as a selling point for cutting-edge AI services in 2026 does the credibility no favours.

The broader point is practical. Fear-based pitches multiply when economic pressure rises. Knowing how to read them clearly is its own form of marketing literacy, and it protects you from spending money on solutions to problems you may not actually have.

33:30 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.
A 1977 GM Ad and the Stubbornness of Status

History has a long memory for bad ideas.

With petrol prices uncertain and supply lines strained, David suggested revisiting the 1970s oil crisis for some advertising perspective. The ad in question is a 1977 General Motors campaign for their full-size vehicles. The pitch: these new models have been refined by computer and wind-tunnel tested to reduce drag, while remaining spacious and comfortable. In other words, GM ran the sums and the big car is still big, but now you can feel okay about it.

Steve calls it the Emperor’s New Clothes, delivered with a straight face. The conversation that follows is genuinely enjoyable, touching on the psychology of status, the peculiar persistence of enormous vehicles in Australian driveways, and a detour into civility versus selfishness that both hosts agree deserves its own episode. For many buyers in 1977, the rational response to that ad was simply to go Japanese. For others, the status and comfort argument was enough. The marketing question for 2026 is whether the same psychology still holds. David suspects it does. Steve remains sceptical, and slightly indignant about a particular vehicle he watched idle at the Paradise bus interchange.

Steve whispers the word &ldquo;recession&rdquo; in a dark alley at the top of this episode. David laughs. Then they get serious. Consumer confidence in the US is currently at its lowest since records began in 1952, lower than during the Cuban Missile Crisis. That context shapes everything Steve and David unpack here, drawing on Mike Michalowicz&rsquo;s book&nbsp;The Recession Response, written in 2020 and, as it turns out, very much written for right now.
They walk through the five stages of a recession response, apply Michalowicz&rsquo;s business hierarchy of needs to the decisions you are facing today, dissect a fear-based marketing email targeting allied health practitioners, and dust off a 1977 General Motors ad that tried very hard to convince anxious petrol buyers that a massive car was actually quite sensible.
Get ready to take notes.
Talking About Marketing&nbsp;podcast episode notes with timecodes
02:00 Person&nbsp;This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal. The Five Stages (And Why Knowing Them Restores Your Agency)
There is a word that makes grown adults freeze. This episode names it.
Mike Michalowicz wrote&nbsp;The Recession Response&nbsp;in 2020 as COVID hit and financial markets groaned. It runs just over two hours as an audiobook. That brevity is deliberate. He knew that a business owner in shock would not wade through a 400-page tome. The book is short because it had to be, and it works for exactly the same reason.
His framework mirrors grief, applied at a societal level. Stage one is shock: businesses freeze, decisions get delayed, and the most dangerous thing of all happens: nothing. Stage two is retreat, where costs get cut, often including the marketing that was quietly keeping the pipeline alive. Stage three is adaptation, where businesses reassess what customers actually need right now and direct engagement becomes critical. Stage four is re-emergence, stabilisation, then controlled growth. Stage five is thriving: expanding, capturing market share, outperforming the competitors who never moved past retreat.
David raises a striking piece of context. US consumer sentiment data goes back to 1952. The current numbers are the lowest on record, lower even than during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Steve shares his FED System: Fish Every Day. A simple discipline of contacting one existing client or contact daily, not to sell, just to connect. It sounds almost too simple. It is also, Steve admits, easy to let slide when you&rsquo;re busy. David adds a story from the 1987 crash: a colleague of his father&rsquo;s arrived at the dinner table the week after, ready to buy a transport company, numbers probably solid, looking for partners. He misread the room entirely. The people he needed were still in shock. He came across as brash and self-serving. The deal never happened. The lesson: you cannot move people forward until you meet them where they are psychologically.
15:00 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today. The Business Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow had a pyramid. Michalowicz built one for your business.
Most people are familiar with Maslow&rsquo;s hierarchy of needs: physical survival at the base, safety above that, then belonging, then esteem, then self-actualisation at the top. The rule is simple: whatever the lowest unsatisfied level is, that is where your energy goes. Michalowicz applies the same logic to business, and David&rsquo;s observation is apt: this model works whether there is a recession or not.
The five levels, base to peak: sales (survival and cash flow), profit (financial resilience), order (systems and processes), impact (brand, loyalty and market presence), and legacy (the business outlasting the owner). Two questions drive the diagnostic. Do we have sales? If yes, do we have enough sales to generate profit? If the answer to either is no, that is where the work goes: not on branding, not on systems, not on anything higher up the hierarchy.
Michalowicz&rsquo;s starkest warning is about debt. Do not borrow money simply because it is available. If the business cannot grow sales and profitability with existing structures, adding repayment obligations makes the next stage harder, not easier. Steve closes this segment with a useful provocation from Stephen Covey: managers find the most efficient way to climb the ladder, but leaders check that the ladder is against the right wall. Michalowicz offers a grounding exercise to find your wall: draw a circle marked A on a blank page, draw three arrows outward, then place a circle marked B in the corner representing where you want to go. Are any of your arrows pointing at B? In uncertain times, the temptation is to move anywhere to escape discomfort. Moving without direction is costly.
26:45 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners. When Fear-Based Marketing Targets Your Inbox
Recessionary times bring out the opportunists.
Steve shares an email received by a client in the allied health field. The subject line:&nbsp;Why your clinic isn&rsquo;t showing up when patients search for you.&nbsp;Written with confident authority. Entirely untailored. Almost certainly generated by AI. The classic structure: assert a frightening problem, imply the reader is falling behind, offer a paid workshop as the cure.
Steve ran the email through Google&rsquo;s Gemini and shared the assessment with his client. Four things stood out. The claim that one in three patients uses AI search draws on broad global surveys of early tech adopters, not the reality of a specialist vestibular clinic in Adelaide. AI visibility is largely a matter of good SEO: schema markup and authoritative content, things a well-managed site is likely already doing. The promise of ten new patients per day would operationally overwhelm a boutique specialist practice, which tells you the sender never actually looked at the business. And deploying Seth Godin&rsquo;s&nbsp;Purple Cow, published in 2003, as a selling point for cutting-edge AI services in 2026 does the credibility no favours.
The broader point is practical. Fear-based pitches multiply when economic pressure rises. Knowing how to read them clearly is its own form of marketing literacy, and it protects you from spending money on solutions to problems you may not actually have.
33:30 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past. A 1977 GM Ad and the Stubbornness of Status
History has a long memory for bad ideas.
With petrol prices uncertain and supply lines strained, David suggested revisiting the 1970s oil crisis for some advertising perspective. The ad in question is a 1977 General Motors campaign for their full-size vehicles. The pitch: these new models have been refined by computer and wind-tunnel tested to reduce drag, while remaining spacious and comfortable. In other words, GM ran the sums and the big car is still big, but now you can feel okay about it.
Steve calls it the Emperor&rsquo;s New Clothes, delivered with a straight face. The conversation that follows is genuinely enjoyable, touching on the psychology of status, the peculiar persistence of enormous vehicles in Australian driveways, and a detour into civility versus selfishness that both hosts agree deserves its own episode. For many buyers in 1977, the rational response to that ad was simply to go Japanese. For others, the status and comfort argument was enough. The marketing question for 2026 is whether the same psychology still holds. David suspects it does. Steve remains sceptical, and slightly indignant about a particular vehicle he watched idle at the Paradise bus interchange.

Talking About Marketing is a podcast for you to help you thrive in your role as a business owner and/or leader. It's produced by the Talked About Marketing team of Steve Davis and David Olney, with artwork by Casey Cumming. Each marketing podcast episode tips its hat to Philip Kotler's famous "4 Ps of Marketing" (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), by honouring our own 4 Ps of Podcasting; Person, Principles, Problems, and Perspicacity. Person. The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. - Oscar Wilde Principles. You can never be overdressed or overeducated. - Oscar Wilde Problems. “I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity. - Oscar Wilde Perspicacity. The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. - Oscar Wilde Apart from our love of words, we really love helping people, so we hope this podcast will become a trusted companion for you on your journey in business. We welcome your comments and feedback via podcast@talkedaboutmarketing.com

Talking About Marketing is a podcast for you to help you thrive in your role as a business owner and/or leader. It's produced by the Talked About Marketing team of Steve Davis and David Olney, with artwork by Casey Cumming. Each marketing podcast episode tips its hat to Philip Kotler's famous "4 Ps of Marketing" (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), by honouring our own 4 Ps of Podcasting; Person, Principles, Problems, and Perspicacity. Person. The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. - Oscar Wilde Principles. You can never be overdressed or overeducated. - Oscar Wilde Problems. “I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity. - Oscar Wilde Perspicacity. The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. - Oscar Wilde Apart from our love of words, we really love helping people, so we hope this podcast will become a trusted companion for you on your journey in business. We welcome your comments and feedback via podcast@talkedaboutmarketing.com

The only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about...

Talking About Marketing

Talking About Marketing is a podcast for you to help you thrive in your role as a business owner and/or leader. It's produced by the Talked About Marketing team of Steve Davis and David Olney, with editing by Tim Whiffen. Artwork by Casey Cumming.

Each marketing podcast episode tips its hat to Philip Kotler's famous "4 Ps of Marketing" (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), by honouring our own 4 Ps of Podcasting; Person, Principles, Problems, and Perspicacity.
Person. The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. - Oscar Wilde
Principles. You can never be overdressed or overeducated. - Oscar Wilde
Problems. “I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity. - Oscar Wilde
Perspicacity. The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. - Oscar Wilde

Apart from our love of words, we really love helping people, so we hope this podcast will become a trusted companion for you on your journey in business.

We welcome your comments and feedback via podcast@talkedaboutmarketing.com

<a href="https://talkedaboutmarketing.com/podcast/">Talking About Marketing</a> is a podcast for you to help you thrive in your role as a business owner and/or leader. It's produced by the Talked About Marketing team of Steve Davis and David Olney, with editing by Tim Whiffen. Artwork by Casey Cumming.
Each marketing podcast episode tips its hat to Philip Kotler's famous "4 Ps of Marketing" (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), by honouring our own 4 Ps of Podcasting; Person, Principles, Problems, and Perspicacity.
<ol>
<li>Person. The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. - Oscar Wilde</li>
<li>Principles. You can never be overdressed or overeducated. - Oscar Wilde</li>
<li>Problems. “I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity. - Oscar Wilde</li>
<li>Perspicacity. The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. - Oscar Wilde</li>
</ol>
Apart from our love of words, we really love helping people, so we hope this podcast will become a trusted companion for you on your journey in business.
We welcome your comments and feedback via <a href="mailto:podcast@talkedaboutmarketing.com">podcast@talkedaboutmarketing.com</a>

When the word “recession” lands, most businesses freeze, and Mike Michalowicz’s deceptively short book reveals why that freeze is the most expensive response of all.