As I noted in my post To Cut or Not to Cut?, this is a smart time for most companies to reduce marketing spend, notwithstanding desperate pleas from marketing services providers that you double-down in the downturn.
Is there a smart, systematic way to do this? Probably, but it's elusive, as confirmed by the many stories I hear of the across-the-board, arbitrary 10%, 15%, 25% cuts many marketers are trying to cope with.
A recent white paper from former colleagues at Deloitte Consulting prompted my writing this post, so let's look at their approach, which they call Structural Cost Cutting.
The premise of the Deloitte's Structural Cost
Cutting is that the big opportunities for big near-term reductions in spend
come from challenging basic assumptions about the business and how marketing
supports it. The savings will emerge from multiple categories of
marketing spend. The Deloitte hit list of areas to examine are:
