Are you feeling it? That nagging sense that the marketing world (well, everyone who isn’t working in online education masterclasses, anyway) is holding its breath and waiting to see what happens next? You’re not alone. Marketing budgets are being frozen and slashed around the world as companies peer ever-deeper into their crystal balls, hoping to divine what the future may hold.
Theoretically, this seems like the safe option: sit back and see what your market or industry is doing before jumping back into the fray. In reality, it’s idle speculation compounded by the fallacy that you can predict or even get a sense of what the economy is going to do before it does it. As Benjamin Graham, the great Wall-Street sage once put it:
“While a trend shown in the past is a fact, a “future trend” is only an assumption.”
Investing vs. Speculating
One of Graham’s most famous contributions to the canon of financial good-practice was clearly explaining the difference between investing and speculating. The former is when you invest money in a company because it’s a sound enterprise, irrespective of how it’s being valued by others in the stock market. The latter is when you invest money into a company because its value or the value of its industry on the stock market appears to be rising or falling. He was a firm champion of investing and a grave critic of speculating and his opinions are still taken as gospel among money managers and professional investors today.
It’s surprising then that so few people in the board room seem to have applied his teachings to their own companies. When you cut your marketing budget at a time like this you are speculating that times will be bad in the future and therefore it’s not worth trying to convince people to buy your product. What you take for granted is that times are always bad for companies that aren’t run very well. Conversely, they are always comparatively good for companies with confident, careful, and discerning management. That’s because, good times or bad, it’s the quality of your work that determines your revenues.
Our Advice
There are certainly difficult and uncertain times on the horizon. Some companies will not survive them. But if you want to be among the organisations that not only survive but prosper, now is the time to act boldly and decisively, to hold faith in your model and your teammates and invest in your future. If, on the other hand, you choose inaction and wait for a sign that may or may not come, you are, at the very least, dooming yourself to falling behind the curve when everyone else starts spending on marketing again. Our advice is to seize the day and start now.
So Where Can I Start?
Why not start your campaign with a video? Carve out your place in what’s to come by speaking directly to your audience, and if you don’t have an audience, use video to create one! Here’s your next steps below:
- Check out our video planning services,
- Take a look at some of our previous work,
- Or simply talk to us today to get started on your project!