“Market leaders market their way through a recession; all other companies try to save their way through a recession.” (Mike Ganey, Senior VP, ad agency Howard, Merrell)

These are tough times, to be sure, but they seem tougher because they are so oppressively omnipresent and so aggressively in your face. It seems that every time you turn around and everywhere you turn, you are confronted by bad news. A pall seems to have settled over the landscape, a pall that is pervasive and pernicious. There is no light apparent at the end of the endless tunnel that we have constructed in our minds.

But – trust me – this too shall pass. There will be a turn-around. It is an eventuality framed by a certainty.

True, you’ve got to survive the recession – or the depression, if you like, or the Second Great Depression, as some like, but when it is over – and it will be over – where and what will your company be?

Might I introduce, for your consideration, the PIMS experience. The PIMS (Profit Impact of Marketing Strategy) database, includes the real world business performance experiences of more than 3,000 businesses representing 16,000+ years of data. Originating at GE in the mid-sixties and further refined at the Harvard Business School, the PIMS database has been managed by the autonomous Strategic Planning Institute since 1975. The strategic data includes information on markets, competitors, quality, structure, environment and financial performance.

Its findings, endorsed by the Corporate Executive Board (I was, for a number of years, a member of the CEB Marketing Leadership Council), are illuminating:

• Marketing spend does not significantly damage return on capital employed (ROCE) during a recession;
• Companies curtailing their marketing spend damage their profitability when the economy recovers;
• Companies that increase marketing spend and that commit to product development during recessions reap the largest future rewards.

The supporting data applied to both B2C and B2B companies. It applied to companies equally in the U.S. and the U.K.

There are reasons for this:

• Brand building requires consistency. Companies can grow share by continuing to generate high levels of awareness, which ultimately translates into customer-perceived value or quality;
• R&D requires similar commitment. Technological advances don’t zig and zag in lockstep with economic cycles. Technology moves relentlessly forward.
• In down times, consumers and businesses alike look to safe havens, familiar brands and dependable suppliers that focus on delivering consistent value. Companies that pull back fall back. Companies that move ahead, stay ahead.

Nothing is ever that simple. But it is not that complicated either.

To quote Dennis Miller, “Now, I don’t want to rant, but…”

In my former company, I was part of an executive committee set up to oversee all the commercial aspects of the enterprise. It was my practice to show the group our various marketing campaigns while they were still in the design phase. I also showed how our corporate strategic intent and marketing program specifics were perfectly aligned and how all aspects of the various campaigns were fully integrated.

And that was the last time they would see or hear anything until I was good and ready to show it. Good and ready meant that the ad or the brochure was produced and looked fantastic and there was a competitive equivalent that did not. It meant that we had evidence customers were happily cabbaging onto our material with documented results. It meant we had won an award or, better still, two. My colleagues were apparently happy with this approach, partially because they trusted me and mostly because they felt it was more important for them to focus on customer issues, like impending threats and looming opportunities.

This made it easy to be late and safe to produce the odd stinker. Which we, respectively, occasionally were and sometimes did. It helped a great deal that our marketing was at least reputed to be among the industry’s best (not difficult) and that, at the end of the day, we were never over budget (difficult indeed). My withholding strategy was, thus, not a tactic to get away with something, but one merely to keep a reasonable distance between us and the abacus crew (i.e., accounting) until we could put our programs in place.

In the hurly burly of everyday, it is possible for oversight to be manipulated rather than managed. Without proper structures and processes in place, campaigns can become inconsistent or run off on some tangent that has nothing to do with the long-term well-being of the enterprise. Happy numbers get presented that mask return on investment.

What we sometimes see is a gap between concept and execution. That gap may be caused by poor guidance or simply poor taste. As a result, some adverts smell like a prickly durian melon. (Never tried one? You can’t begin to imagine what you’re not missing.)

If you need an example or two, check out the continuous outpouring of putrid creative being produced for Pedigree’s Whiskas cat food line. The silly putty or, worse, silly potty humor of the ‘only cats can be cats’ ads are tasteless to the extreme and can’t possibly be enticing for anyone…least of all cat lovers. You want to strangle the loathsome Hubert and bury the lazy and listless Boris alive. The Temptations ads, with cats repeatedly crashing through walls ostensibly because they would hear someone shaking a bag of treats, are simply stupid. Which is clearly how Whiskas sees its customer base. That said, I suppose some will be drawn to the Whiskas Wet Food Challenge. Who dreams this stuff up? Who, on the client side approves? Is this an agency problem or a management one? There are those that will argue that several of the Whiskas ads have gone viral. Certainly the parody ads have. Is this a plus?

The test of pleasure is the memory it leaves behind. Are the whiskas ads ones you will remember or ones which you will do your best to forget. Do these ads ‘stick’ or are they just…well… just sticky?

Seth Godin is a marketer for whom I have the utmost respect. His head is screwed on straight. His books are easy and worthwhile reading. I do have an issue with his approach to Purple Cows and if, in the unlikely event, we should cross paths one day, I will talk to him about plain black and white cows that yield chocolate rather than regular milk or, at the very least, fat free, Omega 3 milk, directly from the udder.

Seth’s Blog, where he posts almost daily, proves that he has reached iconic status. He can be recognized by a single name like Madonna, although he is not at the point where he would be “the marketer formally known as the marketer formally known as Seth”.

In a recent post, The Marketer’s Attitude, Godin describes the perfect marketer. It would be a high energy, relentlessly positive person. It would be someone self-motivated and self-sufficient, able not only to visualize complex projects but also to carry them through to fruition. He or she could engage strangers and embrace ambiguity. He sees the down streams and the downsides of any plan and adjusts accordingly. And so on.

There was something missing from his description, however. The perfect marketer must also be the perfect politician. The astute marketer knows that, in a perfect world, all things are possible. But in a highly volatile world, where people see their investments and imagine their lives going down the rabbit hole, where Boards are insecure and CEOs intractable and budget cuts inescapable, not all things are possible. Indeed, most things – even the small things and especially the right things – require a great deal of personal conviction and much cleverness to gain the collaboration of those in high places if projects are to ever see the light of day.

The marketer must know how to properly package a proposal, how to wrap it in the context of necessity, how to make it risk-aversive, politically-sensitive, environmentally-friendly. He must show it as right for the times and right for the customer. He must know how to segment a project so that it is not a capital intensive venture requiring a long-term commitment from skittish shareholders, but a series of small bite-sized chunks with quick wins and easily quantifiable gains to the bottom line. He must know what to say when and to whom, how to recognize windows that are slightly ajar and how to contain disappointment and move on when they are not.

This is not a cynical view of the corporate world. It is a practical one, reflecting the times and the importance of timing. Selling starts not when a product or a program is ready to launch. It begins when it the next most perfect thing is just a gleam in the perfect marketer’s eye.