Keep On Marketing Through the Recession

My dad, Bob Abraham, was an Ad Man at BBDO in the 60s, then he moved into photography in the 70s before evolving into multi-projector slide shows and multimedia production after we moved to Honolulu, Hawaii.

Back in the 80s, the bottom went out on tourism as the Japanese bailed Hawaii and so did many US tourists. Anyway, the first thing my dad’s clients did was cut promotion, cut ad and creative budgets — generally cut off their nose to spite their face.

Well, twenty-years later, I am experiencing the same thing, as a purveyor of digital PR. Alas, this is an historical problem, as Derrick Daye reaffirmed in his post, Recession Marketing Success Requires Boldness.

All Ad Men, PR Pros, Media Buyers, and Marketers know that this is the perfect time to get an advantage over your rivals because everyone is decimating their marketing, PR, and ad budgets and going “dark,” leaving many of the best ad placements available and at prices you could never imaging circa 2005.

The long-story short is that “during and after the recessions of 1949, 1954, 1958 and 1961, they found that almost without exception sales and profits dropped off at companies that cut back on advertising” and “studies also revealed that after the recessions ended, those companies continued to lag behind the ones that had maintained their advertising budgets.”

Here’s a longer excerpt from Recession Marketing Success Requires Boldness for you to check out:

Over the years hundreds of studies have been conducted to prove companies should maintain advertising during a recession. In the 1920’s advertising executive Roland S. Vaile tracked 200 companies through the recession of 1923. He reported in the April 1927 issue of the Harvard Business Review that the biggest sales increases throughout the period were rung up by companies that advertised the most. After World War II, Buchen Advertising, Inc. decided to plot the sales of a large number of advertisers through successive recessions. In 1947, it began measuring the annual advertising expenditures of each company. When they correlated the figures with sales and profit trends before, during and after the recessions of 1949, 1954, 1958 and 1961, they found that almost without exception sales and profits dropped off at companies that cut back on advertising.

Their studies also revealed that after the recessions ended, those companies continued to lag behind the ones that had maintained their advertising budgets. In 1979 another study by ABP/Meldrum & Fewsmith, covering the recession of 1974-75 and post-recession years, showed similar findings. They found that “companies which did not cut advertising expenditures during the recession years (1974-1975), experienced higher sales and net income during those two years and the two years following than companies which cut ad budgets in either or both recession years.”

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