Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

You may find it hard to find information to support your theory.

Right now, advertising budgets are down. Most media avenues are seeing a decline. Sponsorships of high profile venues (nascar) are being cut or terminated all together. It's not just marketing. Everyone is looking to get lean- and making lemonade out of lemons-- as one CEO I know said, "we are a better company for it". He told me they have cut waste they should have long ago. But times were booming and they didn't know where the waste was. Now, it's easy to see.

Or, as another quote put it: "You cannot spend your way out of a recession"

But what smart co's are doing-- and this was from a meeting with a co owned by Warren Buffet - they are like consumers- -taking advantage of the sales. Buying up smaller competitors, buying new technology (they need biz too and their sales staff are dealing). As the gent conducting the meeting told me, they did this last recession and it worked well. They can only control the things they can control. When this ends, they will be ready.

They can't control their customers are putting off spending. They can't control the recession. They can't control when it will end. But they do know it will end. And when it does, they be ready to make another leap ahead of their sleeping competitors - -who have buried their head in the sand, waiting..waiting.

Dear Fionna,

Know what a long-tailed keyword search is? It's the kind of result you get on Google when you type in the exact nature of the thing you're looking for. In this case, the long-tailed keyword search for:

"academic studies of marketing in a downturn"

provides 512,000 results. Here's the fist page:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=academic+studies+of+marketi...

... and here are a few results FROM that first page:

www.marketingsherpa.com/Reports/DownturnReport.pdf

www.premierguitar.com/About/.../4_Essential_Steps_for_Building.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/Recession-Storming-Downturns-Marketing-Strategies/dp...

www.europeanbusinessreview.com/?p=141 -

https://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5313/is_200904/ai_n31667313/

www.allbusiness.com/marketing.../marketing.../12316774-1.html -

www.arstechnica.com/.../report-expect-green-marketing-to-do-anything-but-go... away.ars -

I don't put much stock into academic studies. But I do put my faith in
the fact that companies that CUT marketing during a downturn go under, or vanish and those that KEEP spending, they come out the other side bigger, stronger, and more profitable.

I hope this helps.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

Some other links that might be of use:
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5878.html
https://www.marketingprofs.com/9/marketing-in-recession-what-do-studies-rea...
https://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/faculty/raji.srinivasan/Raji/IJRM_2005.pdf
https://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/02/marketing-in-a.html