You have to be the first person who calls marketing an investment. Meredith suggest that your premises is correct, but unrealistic for small business… I think she means that perhaps you could have spelled out specifics — personally I think you meant much of what she detail out.

The reality is that small businesses to often think of marketing as an after thought, when in fact it is the first thing. If they INVEST in high return marketing, then their efforts would be seen as a necessity, not an expense.

I have a design and marketing firm. We work with small and large businesses as well as not-for-profits. For us this economy is business as usual, we’ve always guided our clients to think long-term, but invest short-term. Businesses need to cut the fat and leave only the muscle in their marketing efforts… As they always should have anyway. Frank Irias, http://www.DaishoCreative.com

I think we were both making the same point about market share (i assumed worst case scenario-it remained the same). There wasn’t meant to be any reference of direct proportions. Again the point was that the companies that figure out away to gain market share, by having courage to market harder, smarter, more efficient- however they can- in a declining market, will benefit tremendously. I could go into case examples about coca cola, budweiser….that we’ll save that for a later date. Thanks for the comment!!

I also disagree with the assumption that the market share remains constant with the increase of the size of market, this is only true if the number of suppliers remains the same and their relative marketing activities also remains the same, which doesn’t actually happen because as the market goes up more suppliers appear and the marketing spend of the other “waiting” suppliers also goes up again, which changes the distribution of the market share.