I waited until this morning to write a post, hoping that there’d be a clear election result to reflect on. But so far, we’re facing a hung parliament and there are still seats to declare.
Writing a pitch for a prospective client yesterday, and sketching the landscape they will be working in, it was clear we were facing an uncertain future. No matter what the eventual outcome, the looming debt crisis is going to be a massive burden not only for the government but for all of the rest of us.
The other day a colleague and I went to see a client and arrived at a central London tube station where one of the escalators had been switched off ‘to save energy’, according to station signage. Is this the kind of austere future we can expect? Certainly, public spending will be cut – just how far still remains to be seen.
And what about corporate communications? Colleagues who service global consumer goods corporations report that it’s more or less business as usual. Presumably the likes of Coca Cola and Nike are less affected than the rest by the recession, and certainly aren’t reigning in their marketing spend.
But for many other businesses I imagine they’re caught in a dilemma: if customers need more persuasion to part with their money, is the solution to scale down targets, or to push even harder, finding ever more creative ways to get messages out?
There’s something Christine Vachon, an American independent film producer said about 15 years ago, describing the style of film she’d just completed: ‘the budget IS the aesthetic’. Smaller budgets and austerity measures needn’t mean the end of communication as we know it. It just means finding other, innovative (and cheaper) ways to tell a good story and get people to listen.
07 May 2010
Hung, drawn and quartered?
I waited until this morning to write a post, hoping that there’d be a clear election result to reflect on. But so far, we’re facing a hung parliament and there are still seats to declare.
Tagged under: