The Power of Investing in Marketing Technology During a Recession

The message from studies of recessions is clear: Companies that invest in downturns emerge from economic uncertainty more powerful than their competitors.

There’s another recessionary investment trend that manufacturers should put into action. Leading companies spend in a particular way in recessions: They over-index on investing in marketing technology during downturns. Let’s take a closer look.

• 1930s/Radio Advertising: We mentioned the Kellogg’s vs. Post story above. Kellogg’s leapfrog over its competitor involved more than just outspending them. The great leap forward was fueled by an embrace of radio, a new medium that became a high-impact, high-trust outlet during the Great Depression.
• 1970s/TV: In the middle of the decade, with a global oil crisis in full swing, brands such as Xerox and IBM, helped pioneer B2B advertising on TV, which until then had been an exclusively consumer medium. With its Brother Dominic campaign, which often ran during sports broadcasts, Xerox reached procurement and executive decision makers outside of the office and delivered record revenue and earnings in this timeframe.
• 1991/Desktop Publishing: Amid the early ’90s industrial recession, companies brought catalogs and collateral production in-house using desktop computers and early design software (like PageMaker and Corel Draw), cutting costs, gaining more control of their messaging, and accelerating content production timelines.
• 2000/Search Marketing: Even though many dot-com companies went bust in 2000, the internet itself only got bigger, and digital behaviors shifted. Driven by Google, search advertising especially gained traction as companies sought lower-cost, higher-ROI, and measurable alternatives to traditional marketing.
• 2008-09/The Digital Inflection Point: During the Great Recession, advertisers finally began to abandon print budgets and fully embraced online display advertising, which offered the twin advantages of being less expensive than print and easier to prove ROI. At the same time, marketers also leaned into marketing automation platforms, like Eloqua and Marketo, which were fueled by email marketing, another channel that offered a pathway to demonstrating ROI.
• 2025/AI Begins to Dominate: The release of ChatGPT set the AI onslaught into high gear. While many marketers are using AI to help generate content, there are better uses of AI for marketing. Instead of contributing to the content glut, AI helps marketers conduct market and competitive research in a fraction of the time, tailor content to a variety of audiences, and understand what efforts are working (and which are not) far faster than the human eye can.

Ultimately each era of disruption has delivered not only risk but also an opportunity to seize an advantage offered by a marketing transformation. Companies that used these moments to invest in marketing technology saw gains in awareness, loyalty, and market share that lasted well beyond the downturn.

And the AI era and its impact on marketing is only going to amplify the difference between leaders and also-rans.

To learn more about how you can leverage AI to strengthen your marketing efforts, download the ebook, “The Marketing Opportunity 2026: AI Is an Inflection Point for Industrial Marketers.”