In an emergency, stop advertising seems to be the maxim of quite a few businesses. In fact, you wouldn’t be surprised to find it mounted in a little glass-fronted cabinet in their boardrooms. But a recent marketing survey concluded that this strategy could be a major mistake. OK, the survey was commissioned by the advertising industry, but it did claim to have the figures to back up its arguments. It looked at the fortunes of a range of businesses through the last recession and since. And it discovered that, compared with those which kept themselves in the customer’s eye throughout, companies which cut their ad spend during the slump had much more difficulty recovering sales and profits when things picked up.
According to Tapio Pirinen, speaking at the first annual lunch of the TTF‘s International and UK Suppliers Division, the softwood and panel products sectors are in for a bit of a rough ride. Both, he maintained, are characterised by low prices and over-capacity. The result this year could be production cut-backs and even mill closures.
If a marked slowdown does hit – and, of course, there are alternative forecasts for the sector – it will come just as the UK is at the outset of the biggest generic promotional effort for timber it’s ever seen. Wood for Good (annual outlay £3m) says its TV and magazine advertising has already achieved a very encouraging response rate. And this week we’ve got the latest news from the Nordic Timber Council-backed Nordic First campaign (annual spend £1.4m). So far, consumers have picked up around 2.3 million of its Charlie Dimmock-fronted DIY leaflets, plus 485,400 of its ‘inspirational brochures’. That’s a whole lot of interest in wood and hopefully enough, in the event of a downturn, to persuade the industry not to lose its new found faith in publicity.
