Beating the downturn by learning lessons from the past.
With the current state of affairs in the world economy, it’s easy to see how and why businesses choose to cut spending on marketing and advertising during an economic downturn. When faced with the task of saving money and not wanting to make staff cuts or compromising on quality, it’s fairly simple to look at outgoings and make a simple cut on budgets for marketing and especially advertising.
Recently, the Financial Times embarked on a new - and very different - advertising campaign.
http://www.ftadmin.co.uk/downturn_web/index.html
They took space on 16 billboards in London and stripped the boards back to their boards, except for a small poster in the top right hand corner in FT coloured paper that said “Global Downturn - what’s the first mistake businesses make?” There’s then a link to the FT’s website. Here’s what it says on their website:
Faced with a downturn, many businesses cut advertising and marketing spend. But it’s their biggest commercial mistake.
However, in each recession over the past 90 years, independent studies show that the businesses who maintain or increase their advertising spend are the ones who survive the tough times and thrive afterwards.
That’s why we’re still advertising. Make sure you are, too.
And they’re not alone.
- In the recession of the early 90s, Barclaycard doubled its adspend with Rowan Atkinson as a bungling secret agent while Access halved theirs. Barclaycard saw advertising awareness almost triple; Access’s awareness halved.
- In the 1930s depression, Kellogg’s maintained its marketing spend while Post did not. Kellogg then dominated the dry cereal market for the next half-century.
- In 1975 Ford cut its advertising budget by 14% in an attempt to increase profits, while Chevrolet increased its spend. Chevy’s market share rose by 2%; five years later, Ford had still not regained its market share.
Stories like these are everywhere and it’s easy to see why. To maintain or increase spend while others are cutting theirs makes for a game of snakes and ladders as shown in the Ford/Chevrolet example above.
It should be remembered that advertising still needs to be ‘punchy’ and eye-catching. It’s all too easy to say that advertising doesn’t work but how many boring adverts do you skip by all the time? A clever example of a simple campaign that became very popular and covered my the media was this :
A new season of the Soprano’s was given the push it needed by this simple arm and bumper sticker on a few New York cabs. Relatively low-cost but highly effective!
Here at Andrew Parrini Corporate Clothing, we are currently working on a catchy idea which may involve a very large washing line between 2 buildings with the biggest clothes you’ve ever seen - watch this space.
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