Marketers should see recession as opportunity, not obstacle – Patel

By Zion Rufus

Going into 2023 amid supply chain disruptions, labour-market pressures, simultaneous rate hikes, financial crises in emerging markets and developing economies, and the fear of a global recession threatening to hit the world, Neil Patel, a global award-winning performance marketing specialist has advised marketers to see the crisis as an opportunity rather than an obstacle.

“If you are a marketer, you should be preparing for a recession. However, you should be optimistic rather than fearful. Why? Because advertising gets cheaper. This means you can market and spend less – taking up market share. So even if we are headed toward a recession, if your product provides value, double down on marketing and advertising,” Neil said.

“The past two years have presented challenges to all of us, but they’ve also provided an opportunity to innovate and continue improving. We either ‘win’, or we learn a valuable lesson,” Jarred Whicker, Co-Founder of Whitelabeled Media said, validating Neil’s viewpoint.

Meanwhile, for some sectors, events of the outgoing year 2022 such as eroding purchasing power, mass layoffs across tech companies, and decreased ad budgets have also strengthened the likelihood of an industry-wrecking advertising recession in 2023.

However, Garg thinks otherwise.

“If you look at Facebook Meta or Google, the marketing costs have gone up,” said Neeraj Garg, a Greenfield implementation specialist.

“During recession or down times, these companies come under tremendous pressure from shareholders to increase top line revenue and meet market expectations which results in increasing the fee structure. So it’s not necessarily true that advertising costs go down.”

“But yes, I agree that now is not the time to reduce marketing budgets. Normally when sales slow down businesses look at ways to cut costs and save money. Marketing and customer service should not be the areas where you cut costs. These are your opportunity areas where you should double down and grab market share.”