Slow economy? Cut marketing...big surprise...not.

"Big marketers are cutting back overall budgets this year, but not not online spending, which is being largely left intact or getting a small increase in 2008.

Total budgets down: 60% of large companies had either cut or are planning to cut marketing budgets 2008, the survey says, compared to 29% of midsized marketers and only 13% of small ones. Only 16% of big marketers said they were increasing budgets, and 19% reported no change.

Online budgets flat, or up slightly: 38% said they planned to increase online spending, while 45% said online spending would stay the same in 2008. Only 17% said they expected to reduce online marketing, compared to 36% for offline media."

This is always the case, cut marketing to save costs, right? Wrong. This idea is based on an incomplete definition of marketing that causes an incorrect assumption. Most companies believe marketing is advertising, promotion, PR, collateral, logos, etc. (who here hasn't had to shoehorn your marketing budget into the bean counter's "A&P" line item?). One SUBSET of marketing is all of those things, but how soon we forget that there are 3 other "P's" to the marketing equation - Product, Price and Place.

Marketing is identifying a need in the marketplace and fulfilling that need, profitably. It is reading the market, translating those needs into products, building demand for the products, and then getting the product in their hands. So...doesn't it stand to reason that in a down economy, with people having less money and more anxiety, that companies should be embracing those new market requirements and finding a way to still serve their consumers? Doing so, of course, makes the companies money as well as keeps the economy moving.

In other words, shouldn't these companies be spending MORE on marketing in a down economy?

Now, the upside of the stats above is that they're not cutting back where they can measure, i.e. online. So this is good news overall. The ability to measure marketing online is one of the ways we can fight the knee-jerk reaction to cut "marketing."

From Silicon Alley Insider