A client CFO stopped me halfway through a positioning deck last week to ask what happens to all of this if the economy turns. Not rudely. He had the yield curve pulled up on his phone, the way people do this year.
The honest answer is that most of it survives and the part he was proudest of does not.
That part was a campaign platform, eight months old, with a tagline I liked and a media plan I did not. It goes first. It always goes first. Nobody has ever successfully defended a platform in a budget meeting in month four of a bad year.
Recessions do not kill brands evenly. They audit them. Every discretionary line in a household budget gets read out loud in a kitchen at some point, and the brands that come through are not the cheapest ones. They are the ones somebody argues to keep.
Downturns do not reward low prices. They reward brands that have made themselves load-bearing in somebody's life.
Three traits show up over and over, and none of them can be installed in a quarter.
One, a reason to exist that is not price. Patagonia charges more in every economy and got bigger through the last one, because a jacket you keep for fifteen years is a recession argument, not a luxury one.
Two, real distance from a substitute. Costco came through 2008 partly on structural cheapness and partly on being the only place that feels like Costco. Store brands took their share from mid-tier grocery names that had spent a decade differentiating on packaging. If your only advantage is the label, the label is what gets cut.
Three, habit. Coca-Cola, Dove, McDonald's. Boring, weekly, embedded. A brand that lives inside someone's routine is defended by inertia long after the ad budget goes quiet.
Here is the part that gets lost in these conversations. The instinct in a downturn is to go silent and go cheap. Both are expensive later. The brands that spent through 2009 came out with share they never had to buy back. Discounting teaches your customer the real price and they do not unlearn it.
Discounting teaches your customer the real price and they do not unlearn it.
I told the CFO the same thing I will tell you, which is that the work to make a brand recession-proof cannot be done during a recession. Truffles and Barnaby demand dinner at 5:40 regardless of macroeconomic conditions. That is roughly the level of demand every brand should be aiming for.