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Tons of nodding,  great audience interaction and a lot of topics that begged for further discussion. That would be my one sentence description of today’s AMA Roundtable “Marketing in a Recessionary Economy – What does it take to win”.

Here are the points that I found most interesting:

1. Organizations aren’t yet prepared to bet the recession has subsided by increasing budgets for 2010 marketing efforts. The exception was one lucky marketer who was told to come up with a marketing plan in a ‘ideal world’ scenario. I bet when push comes to shove the CFO has a different idea of what an ideal world looks like.
2. CFOs should be at the strategy table with marketing. This was echoed by more than one of the participants. It makes sense given that it is not unheard of for a really great marketing plan or innovative idea to get strangled by a penny pincher in Finance. One participant conceded that now that CFOs are in the room, we likely won’t be able to get them to leave when things turn around.
3. Messaging to our audiences needs to be more about trust and confidence. This is particularly appropriate not just because of the current economic climate but because of the glut of information that people are dealing with on a daily basis. Brenda Truant, of BMO InvestorLine, stressed that trust and confidence needs to reside between clients and agencies as much as between customers and brands. Loyalty is a natural consequence of this type strategy, and who couldn’t use more of that!
4. Steve Mast, of Delvinia Interactive talked about a recent study that they did on the benefit of leveraging existing communities vs. creating a new community from scratch. The study indicated the former to be more effective. I found this particularly interesting given that many of the organizations I work with want to create communities from scratch but the heavy lifting that is required to effectively engage an audience and create brand advocates is daunting given both the human capital requirements and the risk involved . But brand building through engaging in an established community using thought leadership…that’s where the possibilities lie.
5. Organizations want to know their customers better. Analytics and insight is what organizations are looking for. This scenario will definitely work to provide better goods and services for consumers. If organizations are truly interested in knowing more about who their customers are, the fallout should be those customers get more of what they want.

There were a lot of other great tidbits in the session but these were the 5 most meaningful points for me. I work primarily with B2B companies and was fascinated by how applicable the B2C commentary was. There is truly a blurring of the lines that just wasn’t there 5 years ago. Looking forward to the next event…