Leaner is Always Better
There's been a lot written about wasted marketing dollars lately. Not so sure I understand ‘tougher financial discipline' ‘belt tightening' and ‘optimizing the use of marketing funds' as they are being applied to marketing these days. We've talked before about the general mistake of cutting marketing efforts during a down economy as there is such significant opportunity for market share.
It's even worse when organizations apply corporate-speak to cutting budgets and it makes them look like very poor business people. I thought we learned from the last recession, if not the one before that, that organizations can never run fat. Boot-strapping is supposed to be a way of life, especially in marketing, where one has to defend their activities on a regular basis to people who don't understand what we do.
Today's marketer has enough tools available to be able to measure the effect of return-on-whatever you want to call it this week. We should be doing that with every decision we make. The marketing effort is either worth it, or it's not and shouldn't lose its value because someone asked for a marketing re-evaluation or analysis of marketing efficiencies.
