How Brands Can Win in a Recession

Wunderman Thompson has published an essential manual for brands highlighting how to survive and thrive in the face of the COVID-induced recession gripping the world.

How Brands Can Win in a Recession

We all know that brand building is now more important now than ever, but the way we build brands has become much broader, encompassing the entire customer experience.

This report demonstrates that through investment in holistic customer experiences, brands can improve consideration and purchase intent, take advantage of new revenue opportunities and rebuild in a way that ensures they are stronger than ever before post-recession.

The questions and challenges facing brands right now fall into four categories:

Protecting my Brand and Business
Responding to Specific Challenges
Cutting through the Cacophony
Longer-Term Planning

We’ve been here before

In an effort to best serve brands and businesses, we looked back to past recessions for insight and asked the following questions:

What we can learn from the past and what’s different this time?

Why we should maintain brand investment and how and when to spend it?

How brands in different scenarios should act across the expected recession time frame?

Research shows that brands that cut all marketing spend in year one of a recession can take up to five years to catch up with those that maintained spend.

There is no one-size-fits-all formula for winning in a recession, and marketeers must make decisions based on the nuances of their individual brand and business. Based on past learnings and the new context, this report provides general lessons that can be applied across three distinct phases of a pandemic-led recession: react, respond, build.

Explore new ways of working, how to turn insights into action, and learn what technologies are required for successful brand building in a recession.