Ahead of Her Time by Judy Piatkus

Author:Judy Piatkus
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786785671
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2021-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

RECESSION

The recession of the early 1990s was a sharp, painful wake-up call, a forerunner to the advent of globalization that was to completely change the way so many companies traded with one another, both at home and overseas.

In the boom of the 1980s, most ordinary people’s financial situation had begun to improve after the economic gloom that had preceded it. Margaret Thatcher’s rhetoric had encouraged people to become self-reliant entrepreneurs and go-getters, and to rely less on the state to provide for them. It was acceptable to be aspirational. In the middle of the decade we had published a successful hardback, Tycoons: Where They Came From and How They Made It, one of our own ideas, by William Kay, the business editor of The Times. The book profiled a number of hugely successful self-made British tycoons (regretfully all men as we were unable at that time to discover any women), nearly all of whom had been self-starters.

The late 1980s had been a stable time for people employed in the workplace, but all that was to change. The recession of the early 1990s was different from that of the early 1980s in that this time it affected white-collar workers, many of whom had had no previous experience of finding themselves out of work. Faced with the need to cut costs, many employers kept their female staff on because they were cheaper to employ; it was the male white-collar workers who suffered the most. Everyone knew someone who had been made redundant. Some people never got back on their feet. While many companies were hurting, the recession presented a multitude of opportunities for Piatkus, which we did our best to grasp. We kept a very careful watch on our overheads but gradually began to move our publishing programme in a new and exciting direction.

During the 1980s, Piatkus was particularly known for titles of interest to women in the areas of cookery, beauty and health, but since we had launched the company, women had entered the workforce in much greater numbers. For many it was now not a choice but a financial necessity. The price of housing and everyday expenses was rising, salaries were not keeping up and it was becoming common for both parents to have to go out to work. These women, making their own money and making buying decisions in a way they hadn’t before, were a new and previously untapped consumer market and it had become possible to target books to them in new and creative ways. We had a head start on many other publishing companies because we had so many women on our staff and had been marketing to our women customers for many years already.

The marketing of all books was also changing, along with the growth of marketing itself. As selling became more sophisticated, by the end of the 1980s I wondered if I should take a marketing course. It took a while for me to realize that we were already marketing our books quite naturally and it wasn’t until early in the 1990s that we employed our first in-house marketing manager.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.