Posts Tagged ‘communications’
Recession, best time for Corporate Branding, says AdAge.com
A recent article appeared in Advertising Age entitled “Corporate Campaigns Hint at Brand-Advertising Revival” has made some interesting revelation with regard to the corporate world – recession is the best time to hike up your marketing spending, re-do your corporate branding all with the purpose to increase the market share.
The article features a study conducted among some big market players, such as IBM, SAP, GE, Unilever, L’Oréal etc.
Their main points were 3:
1. In times of uncertainty, a company’s duty is to show they’re stable and reliable (SAP model)
2. Others, such as Unilever or L’Oréal are keen on increasing their market share
3. Or simply re-position a brand through added value (the Made in America theme).
The Agency reported significant budget increases to support their spending in the new fiscal year – all this based on a forecast with leading numbers from last year’s results (for example, Schawk, a US company, reported only 16% drop in sales in last quarter as opposed to 22% in the previous one).
Results are to be expected in the light of the new spending, but what it would be interesting is to see their course on the market and their further developments.
Social Corporate Responsability, or the New Order of the World
And the CSR battle has begun. Corporations are struggling with new social realities – CSR, the Corporate Social Responsibility – intended for companies to “do well by doing good”. I’ve recently been through the entire The Economist special report on CSR, Jan 17th 2008, and I was quite impressed.
Google, for instance, hired a veteran, a prominent figure in the business and NGO world, Larry Brilliant, to lead the company’s policy on social responsibility and
But as a former NGO activist, I wonder: Is this good, something to be put forward and supported, or this actually is a shift in responsibility, very cleverly disguised, from governments and/or local authorities to money-making organisations?
Or is this in fact ‘dust in the eyes’ from corporations to draw the attention away from their other misdeeds? As a journalist from The Economist put it, “an ever expanding army of NGOs stands ready to do a battle with multinational companies at the slightest sign of misbehaviour”.
People may call me a cynical when faced with such positive changes, but I believe in the old saying,”the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.
Let’s wait and see!
