Joy Gendusa, CEO of PostcardMania after attending a Todd Rundgren concert Saturday night decides to “disagree” with the doom and gloom of the national economic slump and slash her prices from $389 to $299 – which was PostcardMania’s prices when she first opened the company’s doors 10 years ago. Why? She says if Todd Rundgren can jump up and down like he is a 20 year old and “disagree” with turning 60, then she doesn’t have to agree that the economic slump is going to take her or her customers under.
PostcardMania’s CEO might just have a bout of mania — despite rising paper prices, adding more employee benefits, she’s slashing her prices and taking the hit out of her own pocket... and she writes about her revelation in a stream of consciousness on her blog.
Market budgets are the first to get cut in an economic downturn, yet statistics show that those that do will suffer lower returns not only during the time they quit marketing, but consequentially will have difficulty raising their net income in the years following the recession.[1] Gendusa says she is slashing her prices to help business owners keep from cutting their marketing budgets.
“There’s a consequential effect that marketing has on your business 1, 2, 3 years and more down the line if you don’t market during a recession” Gendusa says, “…and while the cost of living increases along with inflation and other factors, [businesses] will be losing sales and income down the road when they’ll really need it if they cut back on marketing during times of recession.”
Gendusa advises that entrepreneurs must be smarter and use their competition’s budget cuts to their advantage, ride out the recession with more advertising and they’ll come way out ahead when the recession starts to wane.
About Joy Gendusa:
Using a powerful, simple, extremely cost effective way of communicating with customers has earned Joy Gendusa Inc Magazine’s recognition as the nation’s fastest growing direct mail postcard-marketing firm with year 2007 revenues at nearly $19,000,000. Gendusa began in 1998 with zero investment capital. Today, her
[1] In the book, Ogilvy on Advertising, David Ogilvy states his own empirical observations on marketing in a recession and backs it up with an American Business Press collection of pie-chart stats of sales of companies which cut back their advertising expenditure during the 1974-75 recession compared with companies that did not cut back. The companies that did not cut their advertising budgets had more than doubled their sales 2 years later while sales from the companies that cut their advertising had barely gone up 50%. Three years later sales were down for companies that had cut their advertising while it was up for those that did not. The net income for these companies also followed the same suit over the same period of years — those companies that did not cut their advertising had more than tripled in sales, while companies that did cut back during the recession had barely doubled.
