Woolley Marketing: To cut or not to cut the budget in a recession
In his regular column for Mumbrella, Trinity P3 founder and global CEO Darren Woolley explores an area ripe for innovation that marketers should be considering in the face of tightening budgets.
When capital markets tighten and the cost of money rises, organisations are faced with several choices. If you read the marketing industry media, those choices are either cut marketing spend to maintain EBITDA or look for ways to maintain or even increase investment to increase sales in the face of falling demand.
Those that are championing maintaining spend invariably have a vested interest, as either marketers or one of the many agencies and suppliers who depend on the marketing budget to maintain their own revenue and profits. And besides, why shouldn’t they make this recommendation? The evidence from past economic slowdowns (recessions) and disruptions (pandemics) indicates that those organisations who build and support their brands through these times often come though it in a more dominant position than their competitors who did not.
But as my colleague Dennis Flad reminds us in his cartoon here, there is a third option that is often overlooked or simply rejected – innovation.
