The rules governing business are remorseless. If you really want to increase your revenue you need to do one of two things (or maybe both): you increase your share of the pie in your core market and you diversify offering more things than before using your core product as a springboard to generate trust and bring in more customers for new products.

In a compressed economy where customers face the very real pressure of a dwindling income the only strategy which makes immediate sense is to create more revenue streams (more products, new products and new customers). This is a strategy which sits well with Google as it strives to increase its presence in fields like television which are not, at the moment, directly related to online search and Starbucks who recently changed their logo in order to take out the name ‘Starbucks’ and ‘coffee’ arguably two synonymous words, and initiate a strategy which begins to focus on expansion outside their core product.

What Google and Starbucks are doing officially and very publicly is what every business which needs to survive a recession must think of doing. Business logic is remorseless. It does not leave a lot of room for doubt. When you hit a recession like that pressed upon us by the global credit crisis it means that your core clientele have less disposable income than before. In order to maintain your revenue stream you could (foolishly) increase prices but that would mean you would immediately lose all those customers who are on the knife-edge of affordability of your products and services without guaranteeing that you would have any increase in revenue. If anything, such move usually succeeds in shrinking your customer base and helping your competitors who have a cheaper product as your customers, now out of necessity, begin to move to them.

By far the smarter move is to drop prices during a recession (or at least maintain them the same and add extra value to them in order to make your goods or services more attractive) making it harder for your competitors to successfully compete with you and giving more and more reasons to new customers to move away from their current preferences and start to try your products and services. This allows you to become more competitive and increase your market share when most of your competitors are either busy going under or are shrinking their services in an attempt to reduce the cost of doing business.

Smarter still of course is to roll out new products, leveraging your existing customer base in order to introduce, in the first instance, your existing customers to new products and services and then use the success of that to increase trade in both your core products and new ones. This is a principle Google and Starbucks understand intimately. Both companies have seen growth in revenue year on year despite a global recession and their diversification strategy is governed by the need to widen both their existing customer base and the number of products and services they offer as the only viable strategy which can help them increase their market share.

If you are thinking of creating additional revenue streams in your business you need to apply the same, logical, business expansion model to it that Google and Starbucks have applied:

1. Identify the identity of your core clients – these are your existing clients who come to you for your current, core product. By knowing who they are what their needs are you are then taking the first step towards identifying what additional needs and requirements they have. You can then work out what you can offer them in addition.

2. Build additional value in your current core products – work out how to reward all your customers through additional value. It may be through loyalty discounts, preferred customer discount schemes, high customer service, above average product quality or any combination of these.

3. Expand your additional product range – Begin to develop and gradually offer additional products based around a clearly worked out strategy which is designed to reinforce the identity of your brand (Google and Starbucks do it through their logo and how they deliver their products – Google, through the web, Starbucks through its chain of stores) and allow you to grow your trade in a step by step way.

4. Remain competitive – remember you are keeping current customers and drawing in new ones by being competitive and creating added value in what you offer. Price is one of the key ingredients which help customers decide to go for your services in the first instance. It does not mean you need to be the cheapest (Starbucks have made a great business by convincing customers that $2 for a cup of coffee was good value for money) but you do need to have a very clear strategy of communication with your customers which allows them to clearly understand the value you offer and why they should prefer you as a business. (The John Lewis Partnership chain of shops in the UK has grown to a $12 billion business a year exactly because it has succeeded in that communication with its customers).

The blueprint seems easy enough to apply. The fact that it takes large companies to successfully apply it hints at the difficulties:

Put all of this into effect and you are clearly onto a winner no matter what happens to the economy.