In this Issue

🏡    Sell Local
🛒    Buying Power
📣    More Marketing

🏡  Sell Local

If you sell local, market you’re local!

Trump’s Tariffs have triggered waves of nationalism and protectionism — around the world.

Consumers are asking the country of origin, both in B2B and B2C purchases. They want to support their local economies and local companies.

Country slogans are becoming marks of trust:

• 🇺🇸 Made in America
• 🇨🇦 Proudly Canadian
• 🇦🇺 Australian Made, Australian Grown
• 🇩🇪 Qualität aus Deutschland (Quality from Germany)

If you sell to consumers or companies in your country, embrace your country branding. This strategy has been incredibly effective for Sticky Branding’s clients in 2025.

You can even take it a step further and bring it down to your local community.

Customers are looking for certainty. Being an active member of your community creates trust and a shared experience.

One Stat to Watch

$6.6 TRILLION

U.S. stocks lost $6.6 trillion in value in the two days following Trump’s tariff announcement on April 2. Just don’t look at your retirement plans for a while. Look away! 🫣

🛒  Buying Power

We are looking down the barrel of a recession due to the loss of buying power.

Tariffs are a massive tax hike. Countries are slapping a consumption tax, like a value-added tax (VAT), on imported goods.

Without any warning or planning, products are more expensive. The people paying for this nonsense are consumers and small businesses.

Companies like Volkswagen are already passing tariffs on to consumers with “Import Surcharges.” You will see more and more of these surcharges being either directly or indirectly passed through.

This is reminiscent of the constant price hikes of 2022 to deal with global supply chain shortages and inflation. This time, it’s driven by geopolitical forces.

It won’t happen all at once. Like rising interest rates, it takes months for the increased costs to work their way through the system.

This requires two strategic lenses:

1. Internal: Rework your cost structures to reduce waste and costs everywhere so that you can be more competitive and price-sensitive.
2. External: Be hyper-focused on the needs of your customers to help them navigate and de-risk their purchases.

As customers lose buying power, cash is king. Be the partner your customers need you to be by being hyper-relevant and hyper-focused on what is happening to the world around us.

📣 More Marketing

It may sound counterintuitive, but don’t cut your sales and marketing budget.

Nirmalya Kumar writes in the Harvard Business Review, “During recessions, when most firms are cutting back on their advertising, a firm’s share of voice increases if it can maintain or increase its advertising budget.”

As competitors pull back and retreat, and they will, sales and marketing budgets are the first areas to be cut. By simply maintaining your marketing budget, you can out-market your competition.

Faced with so much uncertainty, maintaining your budget is not easy. How can you spend more? The short answer is you don’t have a choice.

If we are facing a recession, you need to get ahead of it. Since the start of the year, I have been advising all of Sticky Branding’s clients to make hay while we can.

We are working to outperform our sales targets in the first half of the year to provide a cushion if markets decline in the second half.

The fortunate part is increasing your marketing budget is not a gamble or even a risk.

Marketing done right is a profit center. You’re investing in your company to acquire and retain customers, which is how you will navigate uncertainty and a downturn.

🤔  Thoughts on Today’s Issue?

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