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Despite the experienced advice of top business gurus to invest in Marketing during economic downturns, such cuts are going to happen – either as a true necessity, or, due to the skittishness of inexperienced corporate decision makers.

This time around, though, maybe we can identify some correlation between Marketing Cuts and Market Share?

That is PR industry watcher Paul Holmes’s interesting idea.  Paul writes:

“So, we all agree, I think, that companies should not slash their public relations budgets in a crisis. And we can all present logical, well thought-out arguments to support our belief. But what we lack – what we nearly always lack, as an industry – is hard empirical evidence.

“But now we have a chance to gather some. Over the next few weeks, some clients are going to either fire their agencies or scale back dramatically. Wouldn't it be interesting to gather a list of those clients somewhere and compare their performance--stock price is probably the easiest measure--relative to industry averages.

“If we are right, those companies should underperform the market. We probably can't prove causation, but we can perhaps establish a compelling correlation.”

I told Paul that I’d help out with this experiment, on the condition that the data is kept confidential and that results are only shared on an aggregate basis (i.e., neither agencies nor clients can be called-out).

If you’re an agency principal, join me in this effort by e-mailing Paul Holmes.  … And may you need to do so very rarely, if at all!!