It's well established that businesses that keep marketing through a recession are better placed for future success.  But it's also a truism that the marketing budget is amongst the first to get cut when times get tough.

Research in 2008 from the PIMS (Profit Impact of Marketing Strategies) database found that whilst companies which cut their marketing spend improved their return on capital employed in the short term, those that continued to spend on marketing achieved a significantly higher return as the economy recovered.

Further research, published in the International Journal for Research in Marketing, finds that businesses with a clear strategic approach to their marketing and a strong entrepreneurial culture are the ones that benefit from increasing marketing spend during a downturn.  Conversely, businesses that lack these strengths could be better off not increasing their spend until the fabled "green shoots of recovery" can be seen.

I'd argue that, even in these circumstances, there is still no justification for reducing your marketing budget - the trick is to get more out of it by adopting the strategic approach and good marketing habits that will see you become stronger into the future and stand you in good stead to deal with any future economic fluctuations.

Our free white paper, Marketing in Tighter Times: How to market as you come out of recession - tells you how to adopt SMART marketing and gives you some easy-to-implement tactics to improve your marketing practice now.

Blog post, Do More for Less, also gives you some examples of how you can change your thinking about marketing to get the very most from your budget.