Portfolio: Meltdown, A Marketing Opportunity

Jeremy Dann has penned an excellent piece for Portfolio.com where he interviewed Dominique Hanssens, the marketing chair at UCLA's Anderson School of Business. This is the most pertinent excerpt from the interview:

Dann: What are some companies that have “upped the ante” during down times?

Hanssens: You can easily point to examples of companies who have done successful innovations—new products and so forth despite the fact that these were launched during a recessionary period. The big growth period for Microsoft in the 1990s, when they went from being big to being a giant, coincided with the early ‘90s recessionary years. They had a lot of new value to offer with their products and were not afraid to get behind them with very aggressive marketing. A current example, if you accept the premise we are currently in a recession, would be Apple, which has been very aggressive with its iPhones and is doing spectacularly well, despite some negative news about the overall economy.

Read the rest of the story here.