Where we should invest our marketing dollars during tough times
Today's announcement by GM Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner that there going to be enormous cuts and measures taken to help the company survive and grow during tough economic times, gives us a lesson on what to focus on in marketing during these types of situations.
While GM will definitely look at reducing and consolidating their sales and marketing budgets, there are a couple things they're not going to do to ensure they don't undercut their own efforts.
What they will focus on in their marketing during the next year or two will be the protection of launch products and continuing brand advertising.
Protecting launch products simply means the new products in the pipeline they have planned to release. To have any chance at growth, they must maintain marketing in connection to them. So must we as marketers. We might as well fold up as a company if we don't market our new products, as it's the only thing that ensures we have a future.
Second, continuing to market your brand is also crucial to not only surviving, but thriving in tough times. Let people forget about you, and well, they'll forget about you. We can't allow that to happen.
Forget about these people that tell you branding isn't important anymore. The only reason they assert that is they don't understand it's only within a certain demographic that is true, and that's young people and young adults. The reason it's true there is they simply haven't decided on what brand they want to connect to long term at this point in their lives. Once they do, they are just as faithful to that brand as any other demographic.
The point is to understand branding and marketing of new products is where the majority of our advertising or marketing dollars should go during slow economic times.
That keeps us in the minds of people and positions us for the time when things start to turn around. These are the two areas we need to keep our focus on and our money in.
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