📓 Your Guide to Recession Budgeting

09 Jan, 2023

As the old (like, really old) saying goes: "feed a cold, starve a fever"*.

So is a recession a cold or a fever (because it is like an economy's immune response (and yes, I am mentally spiralling out on this metaphor))?

Answer: a cold. Feed your marketing budgets during a recession.

I hate Twitter threads like this (I’ve seen the Notion sites that give you the copy-paste template to create ones just like it), but I can’t argue with the advice. The best time to scale advertising spend is during a recession. If your competition is scaling back, scaling up allows you to fill the void and grow your market share. The thread is worth a read, and these two charts from it are why:

per the tweet this came from: This chart illustrates how businesses manage ad spend in the face of recessions. In 2009, the global economic pullback was just -0.7%.
But Advertising Spend dropped a whopping 10.1%.

per the tweet this came from: Conversely, this Gartner study debunks how some leading businesses accelerated during the recession. The most "Efficient Growth" companies maintained or increased their marketing spending during the recession. And broke away as winners.

LinkedIn shared data on why B2B marketers shouldn't sleep on January spend, but the logic applies here as well.

Smart marketers who advertise in January, or another "quiet month," will gain an edge over their competitors, building more recent and fresher brand memories while their competition is quiet. By advertising when competitors choose not to, brands increase their share of mind and effective share of voice, at a bargain price.

The best offense is a good defense. A better offense is scoring when your competitor isn’t even playing defense.

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*Turns out, you should feed both. And, more importantly, drown both (especially a fever). Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate.

#ads #playbooks #strategy