by Leo Enoch

Created on: September 29, 2008   Last Updated: October 07, 2008

Marketing during rough economic times can be challenging for one management decisions. Most company had hard time keeping afloat not to say expanding their market share. Survival mode is the mode where most companies will lead or make their decisions.

However I learnt that in order for your company to survive, not only survive but strive on and take on more market share in an economic downturn, you got to do something extremely different from the rest of your competitors.

If everyone else is cutting their marketing budget? what opportunity does it gives you? You can market your company or your products cheaper and with less competitor for sure. So do you think you should cut your marketing budget or increase it?

Increasing your marketing budget during economic downturn is only for courageous management. Management who dare to be different from the rest. But these in many cases have been the factor why some companies grow exponentially during the economic downturn while others shrink.

Well, is it not obvious that your company receive the most exposure with no or less competitor during the crisis? Beyond the reasonable doubt of the advantages of having more marketing budget during the downturn, it is very critical that the budget is used wisely and strategically in positioning your company to get bigger market share instead of just spending it like normally.

How about going into a price war blindly? It is very common to find that companies are going into price war with each other with ridiculous discounts that you will ever see during normal times. Although I must say that during the economic down turn, you cannot just stand by the side line and watch these companies goes into the price war and bleeding without knowing.

During these times, I supposed that as a management, we should still join the war wisely and not blindly. The reason being a lot of companies collapsed during the down turn are not because they do not have any businesses, but a lot of them collapsed because they cannot get much payment from their customers who are also facing the economic crisis.

The company should evaluate the structure of financing of the operations and cost involved before joining the price war. Then the management should decide the bottom price that the company can go into the price war. However it is extremely important that during this time that as the prices are going down, the payment should become more cash terms instead of credit term.

This is very important in the strengthening the company financial conditions in an economic crisis. We join the war in prices but we should never join the war in giving free money.There you go, two of the most important arsenals that we have acquired in the past years on how to market your company during the economic down turn.

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